Shift from a culture of Compliance to one of Connection

Can a culture built on compliance ever deliver a remarkable Customer Experience?

Some Organizations still believe it can.

A culture of Compliance

There are Organizations out there where compliance still rules.

Where the Bosses tell you – say this, wear that, do it this way.

You could describe it as an overriding tick box mentality.

Based on an inherent belief that when our Department or Function gets ticks in all the boxes, then we’ve met the standard.

And the resulting Quality & Experience is as good as it can get.

Which isn’t necessarily the case as we will see.

Compliance has its place. But not when it takes on Darth Vader-like proportions.

So let me qualify my concern about compliance.

Compliance ‘standards’ such as greeting Customers, keeping the premises clean or conducting necessary verifications have their place in Customer experience.

I’m not suggesting that we throw out our important compliance standards and behaviors.

My concern is when there is too heavy a focus on compliance behaviors.

At the expense of other important kinds of behaviors.

Compliance standards tend to be hygiene factors

Just keep in mind that the behaviors captured in most compliance standards tend to be expected.

A greeting is expected. A clean room is expected. Being sent the right form to complete is expected. Having my privacy protected is expected.

The list goes on and on.

But these standards don’t specifically improve Customer satisfaction or engagement. Because they are expected.

If you’re a doorman at a posh hotel and you open the door for me that doesn’t translate into a ‘wow’ experience.

That’s the job. I expected it.

Your Guest would likely only notice if the doorman stood there and did not open the door. Especially if they were carrying luggage or shopping bags.

Customers tend to notice hygiene factors when they’re missing. Or not delivered to an expected standard.

Such as a Customer Service Staff greeting you but not looking at you. That won’t make you feel welcome.

Or when the flight attendant’s uniform is sloppy. That can give you the impression that the airline is not good with details. Which can make you feel uneasy.

The environments I worry about in this post are those where it’s all about compliance.

And by extension, less about style, individuality and feeling.

Where management systems are set up to catch people who are not complying in some way.

As compared to management systems that are set up to coach and develop people to get better over time.

Employees have thoughts about a culture of compliance

For Employees working in these Organizations, if you don’t follow the instructions to the letter your work life can be pretty miserable.

One of our training Participants worked as a Concierge in an exclusive Shopping Centre.

He shared that every morning, before the Shopping Centre opened, their Boss would line them up drill sergeant style and critique aspects of their grooming.

He said that the comments given were always negative. And everyone in the line up was – to some degree -uncomfortable.

Now think about the emotional & mental headspace these these Concierges had as they started their shift.

Not with a rah rah Team Huddle mentality and happy endorphins.

They started their shift with a negative feeling Which isn’t a great way to be out there in ‘public’ with Shoppers.

Another Participant – a Contact Centre Agent – shared that they had been instructed to say, “Will you allow me to put you on hold?”. Not “May I put you on hold?” or any other version.

It was never made clear why this exact phrase was so important to the Customer experience.

But there was a team of eagle-eared Quality Assurance analysts who fixated on that language. And jumped on any Team Member that didn’t get the verbiage exactly right.

One training Client had this ‘job to be done’

We were invited in to a high end casino to talk to senior Leaders about a potential training engagement.

They had a ‘job to be done’ for the people who worked in one of their Service Departments. These Service Staff were assigned to accompany and support the casino’s high-end VIP Guests (literally their High Rollers).

The challenge was that these Service Staff lacked the confidence and skills to have appropriate conversations with the VIP Guests. The Client learned this from VIP Guest feedback received in survey, interviews and unprompted comments.

Some of these Guests commented that the Staff serving them were either ‘monosyllabic’ or overly formal.

Which was not in keeping with this casino’s brand and CX Vision.

Senior management focused a lot of attention on one VIP Guest comment, bringing it up multiple times during our meeting.

This Guest had written – “Your Staff spent more time looking down at their shoes than they did in seeing how they could be of help to me.”

So we studied their situation

Yes, hiring the right profile of Team Member for this role matters.

But so is how you design and describe their job.

And then teach and coach the Team Member so that they can succeed in that job.

We know that interacting with high-end Customers or Guests requires a more advanced level of communication skills.

So I looked at the current performance standards for these Service folks. As well as some of the training content the casino currently used for their Staff communications training.

What I found was neither unexpected or unusual.

There was a heavy focus on compliance behaviors.

Yes – you use polite words / or not.

And Yes – you smile and greet the Guest warmly / or not

Also Yes – you ask the Guest if they want coffee or tea / or not.

There was a heavy focus on Yes / No behaviours. Compliance behaviors.

Which lie at the heart of the culture of Compliance.

Where this casino did talk in their training about topics like the company’s vision or brand values, the advice given was so vague and high in the sky that it was virtually unusable.

Because nobody could really understand it. So they didn’t know how to connect it to their daily work.

Shift from a culture of Compliance to one of Connection

To create a better Customer experience for these VIP Guests, it was going to be necessary to back-off the relentless focus on compliance standards.

And shift some weight over to a culture of Connection.

Where we earn connection with our Customer or Guest through behaviors that involve style, personality and feeling. Which means using more and relevant calibre standards such as –

Empathy
Listening
Warmth (or any other brand value)

Calibre behaviors are about how well something was done.

So once selected, measure these behaviors on a range. Such as Excellent, Good or Fair. Or a quantitative scale such as 3, 2 or 1.

Let me reshare the earlier examples here with potential scoring attached –

Empathy (great empathy, good empathy, fair empathy)
Listening (5, 3, 1)
Warmth or other Brand Value (3, 2, 1)

So if a Team Member performs as ‘good’ in Empathy, our job as their coach is to help them move to ‘great’ at empathy.

Of course you have to select the right calibre behaviors. And define them clearly and well.

No more vague or high in the sky advice.

But that shift from a culture of Compliance to a culture of Connection benefits everyone.

Customers, Employees and the Organization at large.

A Tale of Two Cultures: Compliance or Connection?

One of my favorite expressions in Customer Experience is this one – “CX is the operationalization of the brand promise.”

And there is no doubt that some level of compliance standards will be involved when you ‘operationalize’ the brand promise. The right opening, the right phrases, the right look.

The problem comes when these behaviors – and discussion around these behaviors – crowd out discussion about what’s really important.

The Customer’s perception or feeling about what they went through.