partner, is in charge of ensuring that internal customer trust is gained and sustained. However, the buck actually stops with the overall head of the institution that represents the executive arm of the board. Cultures where internal customer trust is absent and there is backstabbing, posturing, cliques, alignments, internal cartels and workplace caste systems, based on all manner of stereotyping and discrimination, are enabled by leadership who either turn a blind eye or gain from it especially at a personal level. The internal customer experience excellence determines the ultimate experience for the external end consumers. Promises to the internal customer need to be made and kept. Staff teams tend to distrust the organization’ s leadership and each other when communication is not clear, transparent and accountable. Whatever the organization promises to the staff, it needs to deliver and do so consistently. This needs to be at all levels both written in terms of contractual obligations, human resource manuals and other documented guidelines, as well as spoken by leadership continuously to enable paper to move to practice.
There need not be any inferences and gray areas, and when these arise, there needs to be a speedy move to clarify and set everything straight. This level of consistency builds a culture of saying and doing and the internal customer expectations thus get met. This sets the tone institution wide and has the biggest brand asset( the people), positively attuned to delivering on objectives. When internal customer expectations are met, it builds confidence and confidence acts to assure and reassure. This then becomes the internal customer’ s truth in tandem with the institution’ s truth; a very desirable status that breeds the much needed but in short supply- psychological safety
The next big thing with regards to the currency of customer trust is to ensure that customers both internal and external have unshakeable trust that if something does go wrong because it will, that the institution will endeavour to do its best to fix it.‘ To err is human, to forgive divine’- an excerpt from Alexander Pope ' s poem " An Essay on Criticism " is the mainstay of humanity. As institutions are built on the people who work there and require humanity to deliver on the strategy, it does go without saying that mistakes will happen. Even in organizations that may be highly automated and run on robotics, there exists the human element that design and inbuild instructions for application, and therein lies the risk of failure. It is inevitable that something( s) someday will go awry.
Customers are inherently not expecting perfection, because they too are human beings and are wont to many deficiencies. What erodes trust though, is the reaction to mistakes or service failure situations both internally and externally. When the response does not inspire trust, it takes a very long time to recover from the downtime. When something untoward does happen, it is important for the institution to kick into action the customer communication and failure recovery process at the soonest possible. To get this going, it is of utmost importance for these service failure guides to already be in place, and to have all manner of risks and their accompanying scenarios mapped out to enable the role takers to kick into action. It is quite the challenge to start thinking about what to do when things go wrong, in the middle of trying to sort out the actual challenge.
As with human beings, crises do not lend themselves to straight and reasonable thinking, but elicits the flight, fight, fawn, freeze responses. Clearly not the best recipe at all for disaster management, and the meal to be served on the table that is restoration of customer trust.
The amount of institutional distrust generally hanging in the air, has it that customers, should something go wrong and is not well addressed, will infer that a brand is trying to shaft or shortchange them, and use their‘ might’ to take advantage of them. The same goes for internal customer conflict situations, with staff feeling like the‘ underdog’ whose employment rights are being trampled upon and their pain discredited. This can very easily be righted by doing all it takes to assure the aggrieved party that there is deep and meaningful listening and acknowledgment of the issue, and the accompanying impact on them. All that is needed is for the slighted party to know that their matter is being handled with the seriousness it deserves.
Whether the error is emanating from the customer or not, the same standardized professionalism should apply in trying to correct the mishap and regain customer trust. Of significant interest is that restoration of lost trust yields sticky customer loyalty having been through the proverbial fire and coming out more bronzed for it.
The currency of customer trust is one that needs to be traded with quite carefully, intentionally and with great deliberation. Organizational customer experience architecture needs to be designed towards ensuring this sits at the core foundational level, and everything else built up from there. Both communication and action need to align, to enable institutions transcend the sustainability test of time.
With customer obsession- that cannot happen without embedded trust- currently taking center stage in institutional strategy frameworks, it goes without saying that reciprocity reigns. Customers that trust a business that’ s obsessed with them will likewise be obsessed with it for life.
Carolyne Gathuru is the founder and director of strategy at LifeSkills Consulting. She has several years of experience in customer experience strategy development and training. You can commune with her on this or related issues via mail at: CGathuru @ life-skills. co. ke.