Customer Focus

Customer Service vs. Customer Focus

Customer Service is an operation or an activity of a company to compliment the product or service offered for the convenience of the customer. On the industrial level, customer service may include installation, repair or maintenance. For retailers, customer service can include delivery, gift wrap or credit.

Customer Focus involves the strategy of a company to develop long-term relationships with customers. A long-term customer focus would indicate the ultimate goal of an organization to develop a lasting and loyal relationship with its customers versus a short lived relationship.

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Managing and Leading Relationships

Managing customer service

The actions necessary for an enterprise to execute customer service in daily operations, what it offers and promises, are managed through systems, programs, and policies from senior management. They are critical to implement the blueprint for 'what' needs to be done to get the desired results the enterprise needs to be successful. Specific training is most often needed not only within the enterprise but often from outside sources as well. Relationships, or the people part of the execution, are generally managed through such programs (i.e..- training programs). These programs are critical to insure not only consistency of operations but that enterprise, industry, and often regulatory standards are met as well.

Managing customer focus

An enterprise plan set forth by senior management which most often includes specific actions or programs to compliment and provide follow-through for customer service. Most often measurements and assessments are performed internally and externally to share with everyone in the enterprise. Relationships are managed through procedures and schedules just as with customer service but being a long-term strategy there is a need for more leadership to build involvement, participation, and ownership for everyone - especially on the frontlines. This is where managers often feel "caught-in-the-middle" between managing the strategy's from above while leading the performance of team members, collaborative teams, as well as the satisfaction of customers.

Leading relationships while simultaneously managing them

Our practice has found that the closer you get to the frontlines of daily operations in most all enterprises the greater the need for managers to lead and manage simultaneously in daily operations.

What managers need are tools, or activities, to lead relationships just as they have for managing relationships. For example, frontline managers who manage cost controls have tools such as budgeting, forecasting, inventory, purchasing, and waste control to achieve the desired results. The same manager also needs to lead a customer focus strategy and simultaneously keep everyone on the team motivated, performing, and participating in daily operations. The manager has tools to manage relationships like rewards, feedback, and missions; but service is a high degree of soft relationships and understanding between team members and others. We have found the three critical areas for long-term relationships to be with customers, fellow team members, and members of collaborative teams both external, like suppliers, and internal, such as Marketing.

Customer focus, or any strategy, cannot be maintained long-term with only the repetitive application of managerial tools alone. Unlike cost controls, to maintain customer focus a manager needs activities to lead relationships as well. They need to build soft skills such as appreciation and recognition not only with customers but team members and members of partnering teams both internal and external to the enterprise. We have found, through best practices, that with support frontline managers can lead relationships for such skills in daily operations to maintain everyone's attention for focus, create experiences for learning, and demonstrate intentions for commitments. Thus, without changing a single thing they are currently doing operationally, frontline managers can lead the relationships of everyone to provide follow-through and continuity for those programs, systems, and procedures they are already executing on a daily basis.

This makes the managers tasks easier because they can get their own team members involved, participating, and self-motivated while building a dialog with customers and getting support from collaborative teams both within the enterprise and outside it. Frontline managers also learn a tool for developing career soft skills to compliment their hard skills. They can delegate these soft skills just as they do their hard skills.

All of this is critical for the long-term because in order to make strategies like 'Customer Focus' continuous, frontline managers must create action by making the "ends" their "means"! For instance, senior management may ask that managers execute strategies in daily operations to create 'focus' by providing feedback from customers and/or training programs on customers. To maintain this strategy long-term in daily operations, a frontline manager must not only execute these programs but also use activities to lead 'focus' with team members to create learning and commitments towards customers. Thus, the ends of senior managers are the means for frontline managers.

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