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"CRL" - Customer Relationship Leadership

Sound familiar?  You have completed all the operational checklists, checked all the inventories, completed all the schedules, evaluated all the measurements, reviewed all the staff training; and yet, during daily operations you frequently experience variances in team member levels of focus, commitments, and learning towards customers.   We believe the reasons lie in the recognition that these crucial factors rely not only on managerial skills but also on leadership skills - even at the frontlines of operations.  The reason?  Workplace relationships are involved and enterprises must not only manage them but lead them as well.  Especially on the frontlines, they include customers, associates, and partners (both internal and external) often simultaneously.  While programs manage the tangible and visible areas of operations creating structure and discipline, frontline leaders need skills and tools for leading the intangible and invisible "people" areas on a daily basis.  Winning hearts and minds by also leading workplace relationships and experiences through emotions, thoughts, communications, and learning which are often non-verbal and unconscious. 

Make the connection and provide follow-through for all your enterprise's management efforts, especially toward relationships, with a practice for leading relationships.  The "Team Leadership Practice" provides frontline managers and team leaders with a tool to win and make a difference as well as become a thought leader in getting results.  This is done by leading "asking" on the frontlines.  As enterprises have formal and informal communications throughout the organization, we present an activity to lead an informal asking process to compliment the formal asking process.     

You can lead your team in asking and sharing feedback to the all-important question "How are we doing?"  Build long-term customer focus, learning, and commitments for everyone providing services and products to customers on a daily basis.  This activity provides a connection to help execute the enterprise's CRM efforts of identifying and meeting the needs of particular customers by getting everyone involved, participating, and self-motivated in the team's efforts.

How does it work? 

• First, senior management uses CRM to ask the questions of who are customers?  What needs can the enterprise satisfy with services and products? and how does the enterprise provide those services and products to customers?  Senior management then shares this feedback with everyone to support systems, procedures, policies, and programs to manage the execution of operations on a daily basis.  

• The next step is CRL, a user-centered approach, where frontline managers lead relationships by using the what needs to be done from senior management to ask and share feedback from customers as to how are we doing with execution.  This is an activity for stimulating focus through feedback, learning from experiences, and commitments from involvement through asking.  Feedback is also provided back to senior management to make possible adjustments for the long-term to their CRM initiatives.

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© George Reavis - george@thankingcustomers.com

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