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According to retired four-star general Colin Powell, “Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers, who can cut through argument, debate, and doubt to offer a solution everybody can understand.” I would argue extraordinary customer experience brands are also great simplifiers.
This is the fifth and final post in a series titled “How to Deliver Memorable Experiences in a Pandemic and Post-Pandemic World.”
In my recently released book titled Stronger Through Adversity, I assert:
For many leaders and frontline staff, the demands of the pandemic produced runaway busyness at the expense of demonstrable productivity. Leaders were checking in more and communicating at an increased cadence. Team members were balancing the demands of work with the needs of virtual education for their children. Everyone waded through an onslaught of news stories about the virus. Crisis response meetings supplemented regularly scheduled team huddles. People were developing or receiving training on topics like how to work from home or operational changes required in response to rapidly changing government health guidelines. How could anyone filter the necessary from the clutter?
In the midst of all that confusion, team members and customers rushed toward leaders and brands that simplified their experiences and made their lives as easy as possible. In Stronger through Adversity, Ben Salzmann, President & CEO of Acuity Insurance offered insights on how to simplify the employee and customer experience by effectively leveraging technology and empowering team members through training. Ben suggested you must…
“invest in people and technology. Assuming you have selected talented people and provided them with cutting-edge tools, it’s just a matter of modifying those tools in response to circumstances. In our case, we were able to adapt technologies so our employees could focus on our agents and customers without being disrupted. Instantly, 98 percent of our employees stopped working at headquarters and began working in their bedrooms or at client sites. It happened flawlessly. They were handling large, complicated commercial and individual policies, and executing smoothly. We looked at our business much like building an Olympic marathon team. We selected the best talent and provided them world-class training and technology tools to focus on the goal of extraordinary care for one another, our agents, and customers. That approach served us well before the pandemic and may have even served us better throughout it.”
Inspired by Ben’s insights on simplification of priorities, and easing the experience of team members and customers here’s this week’s challenge questions:
- Have you looked at your customer experience and sought to remove complexity, corporate-speak, and unnecessary steps?
- Are you on a continuous journey to remove complexity and friction from the life of team members and customers?
- Are your technology investments and training programs producing team member and customer ease?