Customer Culture

Customer Culture draws on lessons from some legendary sales and service enterprises, particularly FedEx and UPS, as well as midsized concerns, small businesses, and startups, to demonstrate how leaders and managers can consciously develop the cultural structures or systems that will motivate employees to focus on serving their customers (internal or external) for sustained, profitable growth. According to Basch, creator of FedEx's legendary sales and service organization, culture is a system that drives an organization s performance. This system can generate a variety of destructive "customer-cancerous" activities, or it can motivate people to perform in ways that create profitable loyal customers. Believing that "[Cultural] systems, not people, drive 95 percent of what goes on within an organization," he identifies six primary attributes of a well-designed cultural system: (1) a clear picture of the desired customer experience vision, (2) a code of conduct (i.e., rules) of the game that will not be compromised values, (3) specific time-critical results that the organization desires to achieve goals, (4) the people s desire or determination to achieve the goals relevance, (5) the results (i.e., scoreboard) that informs people of their relative success feedback, and (6) the specific procedures taken by the people to achieve the goals actions.Essentially, CustomerCulture is a simple, yet powerful, primer for taking customer service to extraordinary levels, because it clearly links every aspect of a business: management, leadership, HR, teamwork, finance, sales, marketing, manufacturing, development, information technology, and strategic thinking. The result is a picture of an integrated, healthy culture of the customer that influences performance and profit over the long term. It is a system that Basch says "works for a raccoon in search of food, a person attempting to lose weight, a government attempting to resolve a societal problem, or an organization attempting to improve customer focus." The book is also about "constant and never-ending change," another fundamental principle. The CustomerCulture theory and practice Basch details provide the framework for creating organizations where change is a given. In particular, the change process forms the basis of FedEx s CustomerCulture its beginnings, growth, and dominance of its industry. And, it is so basic that the author insists that it can be used to do most anything: "lay off people, implement new technologies, reorganize a company get people seeing change as an opportunity for growth and advancement "