In the last several weeks, I’ve seen a couple articles – in reputable publications like Harvard Business Review and The Wall Street Journal – about the “dangers of hiring for culture fit.” They cited that hiring for culture fit destroys things like diversity, creativity, and innovation. And then I saw the responses on LinkedIn because it became a “today’s news and views” topic, and I was baffled.
Oh boy. I think we need to start with some definitions.
As a customer experience professional, you focus a lot on the customer. You put the customer on a pedestal. You put the customer front and center. And rightly so; without customers, you have no business. But you have to remember this: in order to deliberately design a customer-centric culture, you must put employees more first. Only when employees have a great experience can customers have a great experience, too.
I originally wrote today’s post for Forbes. It appeared on Forbes on March 5, 2019.
“Customers are connected.” “Customers are more-informed than ever.” “Customers trust each other more than brands.” “Customers have the power.” “Customers are in control.”
I write about organizational culture and core values quite often. One of my most recent articles on this topic was about whether or not employees believe in their companies’ core values. In that post, I shared this statistic from Gallup: only 23% of U.S. employees believe that they can apply the core values to their work, while only 27% believe in the values. That’s pretty dismal, and I think I know why that’s the case.
Customer experience professionals got an early Christmas present last week in the form of a revised statement on the “purpose of a corporation.” Well, it was a revision for the CEOs at the Business Roundtable, but many of us already know what the purpose of a business is.
With whom and how do you socialize customer insights?
You’re listening to customers. You’re combining their feedback with those bread crumbs of data that they leave with every transaction and interaction with your brand. You’ve developed customer personas to better understand who they are, what problems they are trying to solve, and what jobs they need to get done. You’ve mapped their journeys to understand their experience today and their expectations for a better experience tomorrow.
Are you making this mistake when journey mapping? We already know that people are making mistakes when they’re journey mapping. I’ve outlined several of them in past posts:
This blog reflects the personal opinions of individual contributors and does not represent the views of Futurelab, Futurelab's clients, or the contributors' respective employers or clients.
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