Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility

by Patty McCord

Any company with a customer service organization wants those people to be highly engaged, and the first step is to teach them how to read the company’s P&L. Of course, generally they are the last people the P&L would be shown to. After all, most of them don’t stay long, right? They’re the lowest on the totem pole. Yet all business success is fundamentally driven by word-of-mouth marketing, and the people who are in direct contact with customers must understand that their every interaction with a customer leads to that person telling another person, for free, either to use the company’s product or service or not to. Everyone in customer service, from day one, should understand exactly how the experience they provide customers directly impacts the bottom line. Making that clear isn’t difficult. Every company has calculated its cost of customer acquisition, and each person who becomes a customer on another customer’s recommendation saves the company that amount of money. Every company can share that information with service representatives as part of bringing them on board.