Are we earning customer-driven growth? What do our behaviors say about our company?

“Experience” is, in its purest form…Leadership BRAVERY.
It is Leadership Bravery in making choices that enable our people to rise. It is clearly knowing and living our values as a differentiated way to grow profitably. It is leaders who model behaviors honoring customers and employees – that everyone can model across our entire organization. And it is honoring customers’ lives in how we enable them to achieve their goals, make them feel honored and respected, and in the end…earn their admiration for how we conduct ourselves in business, and for the kind of people we are.

Please state which Department/Role you associate yourself in using the drop down box.

Are our employees
thriving?
0/9
Questions Answered
DO WE NURTURE A THRIVING ENVIRONMENT FOR EMPLOYEES? Do we elevate the spirit of our people; inspiring them to bring the best version of themselves to work? Do our solutions and actions deliver congruence of “heart” – what people know is right and “habit” – what they are encouraged to do at work? Do we make it easy and a joy to deliver care, empathy and value?
1.
We make employee selection a priority. We extensively screen and select people who share our organizational values and demonstrate our behaviors. We always approach recruiting as hiring partners…. not filling positions. We have established our own unique hiring and selection processes to find people who align with our values, so we can trust them to rise.
2.
We invest heavily in training and development to prepare and enable peak performance. We invest in prepared and enabled employees.
3.
We consider all of our people to be the mechanism in which we deliver an exceptional customer experience. We reinforce this responsibility in the processes we build, the solutions we develop and in the interactions we have. We give everyone the encouragement, time, information and permission to deliver the exceptional customer experience – no matter their role.
1.
We provide the ability for our people to innovate and improve in order to deliver value to customers. We believe in the words of our people and consistently listen to understand and elevate their role in improving customers’ lives.
2.
We prepare for our people to provide solutions. We proactively identify where employees need to “make the call” and prepare employees to act with honor and integrity and make exceptions when warranted. We honor the dignity of employees by removing unnecessary rules and policies. We release control so employees can innovate and solve problems.
1.
We believe that living and believing in our values and behaviors will assist us in growing our business. We coach people to take the initiative on behaviors that exhibit our values and earn admiration– and to challenge processes, actions and rules that do not. We encourage people’s initiative in these matters consistently across our organization, with every leader.
2.
We reward and recognize employees for innovation, ingenuity and thinking on their feet. We reinforce our belief in employees. We celebrate being bold, doing the right thing and making informed decisions. Our leadership models caring behavior, and celebrates and promote people for their human, caring behavior.
1.
We check our bias at the door. Our growth is earned through inclusive and respectful behavior. We welcome each other’s differences and ensure that our colleagues feel comfortable being their authentic selves. We do the work to eliminate unconscious bias with customers and actively work to remove any bias in our industry. We prepare our people to remove unconscious bias with each other.
2.
We show up as a “caring” company. We elevate everyone’s purpose – uniting all in the mission of improving lives. We guide cross-company behaviors to develop a “caring” organization. This gives us a leadership lens through which we evaluate process, people and how we enable people to rise.
Do our customers feel
respected
& valued?
0/8
Questions Answered
Do our behaviors and actions say to customers and partners: “We RESPECT you.” “We value you.” Does respecting people’s time, choices, needs and requirements form the foundation for our decision making and how we run our business?
1.
We reduce “service exhaustion.” When customers need us, we solve things for them completely. We don’t run them around. We make it easy for the customer to get their situation solved by simplifying the actions and steps required. We are on top of it – and don’t make the customer have to check back in with us to find out if they are put back together again.
2.
We honor customers’ time and their clock. We show respect, by running our business on “customer time.” We are built for efficiency as customers get basic services accomplished. We never make customers wait for us or wonder where we are. We give customers control of the schedule, based on their needs, not ours. As a result, our customers feel like we honor their time and their schedule and see that we are fanatical about responsiveness.
1.
We commit to honoring our customers by “knowing” them. We invest in understanding their business and priorities and in uniting information about who they are and how they interact with them – so our customers never have to remind any of us who they are, what are their priorities, who they have interacted with, or how important they are to us.
2.
We provide our customers with a seamless, simple, transparent way to depart that might earn their future return, based on our treatment of them. We are humble. We learn from the experience and focus on how we can improve from it.
3.
Our leaders care and want to know every day - how we can help our customers be successful. We invest in understanding customers’ experiences – so we proactively reach out when things go wrong and encourage all to give customers options for how to communicate and reach us. We insist that we keep customers apprised and give them peace-of-mind.
1.
Across our company, we “talk straight” and have a voice of our own. We deliver “understanding” – not lingo, jargon, and extra steps and paper that creates friction for our customer. We have consistently eased the burden of what paperwork we require, and how we require it – to make customers’ lives easier.
2.
We are available to customers based on how they need us and when they need us. We remove the extra steps, being put on hold and anything that says, “our process or time is more important than yours.” We make our availability and responsiveness a reflection of how much we care.
3.
We don’t let the boundaries of our organization get in the way of delivering value to customers. We insist that our people connect their work across the silos– so we deliver holistic solutions that meet our customers’ needs. We are proud to work as One.
Do we enable customers to
achieve
their goals?
0/14
Questions Answered
Do the actions of our business prove to customers that we organize ourselves and act to help them achieve their goals? That we have their best interest at heart? Do we achieve our goals by prioritizing customers goals as mission critical to our prosperity and success?
1.
Everyone can explicitly connect their work to our purpose. We have communicated our purpose and behaviors to enable employees to deliver on our purpose and behaviors to our operation.
2.
We have clarity of purpose for why we exist – and how we exist to improve customers’ lives. Across our entire company, we all know our values and regularly demonstrate them, which makes our identity clear to all that interact with us.
3.
We fundamentally believe that in order to grow, we must be a company united around enabling customers to achieve their goals. CUSTOMER goals, not our internal goals, are our first order of business and drive our priorities. Leaders inspire us to use customer goals serve as our lens for decision making, investments, and in steering the course of the company.
1.
Our people are coached on the skill of listening and understanding. We constantly seek Voice of the Customer to improve our clarity for knowing customers’ goals and what they want to achieve so we are able to support their success.
2.
We formally document and share customer goals across the organization, so that this understanding can guide how we develop our products, our service and our people. We have a company-wide awareness of these goals that people can access, which we transparently share.
3.
We actively and continuously watch and listen to customers to understand their priorities and goals and to translate and communicate them across our organization.
4.
We regularly use our products and services and interact with customers. We eliminate detachment and cynicism by connecting to their experience.
1.
Across the organization, we are united in how we design experience, process, service, products and technology to deliver to these goals. Leaders stress the achievement of customers’ goals as work is presented to ensure they are always focused on helping customers achieve their goals at the same time recognizing our own goals.
2.
We have shared metrics across our operations, silos and people to enable line of sight of customer goals across our company and to drive accountability in our responsibility to deliver on them.
1.
Our customers feel that we “have their backs” when things go wrong. When failures occur, we act decisively, and in the customers’ best interest. We look to fix the process rather than blame people. We speak quickly, give the facts and are accountable and responsible. This is our finest hour.
2.
We have a rigorous recovery plan ready for a company-wide customer crisis. Similar to an IT recovery plan, we have plans to respond if a large-scale customer crisis occurs – we keep our customers informed and aware.
3.
We wire customer empathy into our operations, policies and processes. We enable our employees to read the situation and deliver the proper solutions. We hire and develop good people – then trust them to make the call to ensure we deliver our values, meet customer goals, and keep the customer.
4.
We understand customer emotions as they work with us and use this understanding to deliver exceptional experiences.
5.
We honor customers by starting with their life and priorities when we interact with them. Their needs drive us – not our process and paperwork.
Do acts of leadership
bravery make us
stand out?
0/9
Questions Answered
DO WE CHOOSE THE BRAVE PATH OF ACTIONS THAT EARN GROWTH AND ADMIRATION? Do we forge our own path, choosing the hard, conscious-led decisions about what we will and will not do to grow? Do we earn growth through transparency, fearless sharing and behaviors that prove we strive for a balance relationship with our customers and partners? Are we clear about how we want to be remembered: and that we stick to actions and behaviors that define who we are as people?
1.
We are humbled when mistakes happen. We put aside ego and bravado. We learn and change from our mistakes. We don’t make excuses or dodge the situation. We ask forgiveness and ACT. We let customers know when something goes wrong. As soon as we know of a service failure, we inform customers and prepare a swift recovery. We focus on fixing the process rather than blaming the people.
2.
Leaders’ behaviors inspire what they want delivered. They live our purpose and model the behaviors that we stand for personally. They make decisions aligned to our purpose and communicate them, so that everyone has a beacon to follow for their own behavior.
3.
We allow people to act. We create an environment in which everyone has permission to exhibit our values and do the right thing. We guide and enable employees to take ownership of customers with issues as they encounter them and encourage them to show their humanity and put customers back together again. All levels in our organization are given permission and celebrated for these actions.
1.
Two-way trust defines our actions with customers. We actively decide to be transparent with customers. We suspend the fear of sharing information. Customers feel that we trust them using our forms, reading our fine print, as we interact with them, and in working through our paperwork and contracts.
2.
We focus on earning the relationship, not just about making the sale. We always deliver transparency in the solutions that we offer. Customers describe their experience with us as truthful and transparent and without surprises.
1.
We share all the facts in every situation, so customers can decide what is best for them. We guide them through the complexity of options and pricing, guiding them fearlessly to all of the information. We walk away from goals, compensation and reward systems that require getting the customer to commit or putting our people in a position to guide customers toward a sale to meet their goals, quota or rewards.
2.
We believe in customers as an asset, not a cost center. Our decisions and choices are guided by investing in them and in our relationships with them. To that end, we remove practices that dishonor customers as assets or put them in a position to question if we value them.
1.
We charge what is fair, not what is possible. We resist the temptation to grow through charging more than necessary for something to customers because we can and instead focus on growth through adding value. We don’t nickel and dime customers.
2.
We honor the dignity of customers. We strive to remove policies and procedures that protect “us” from “them.” Our policies, procedures and operations are not guided by legacy industry practices. Delivering to meet customer goals and our promise gives us the courage to break from tradition and stand apart from our competitors.