The Service Culture Handbook helped popularize the concept of a customer service or customer experience vision.

A customer service vision is a shared definition of outstanding customer service that gets everyone on the same page. You can read more about that definition here.

One of the most common challenges when writing a vision is the final statement is too generic. Even worse, it doesn't focus on customers. Here are a few examples:

"We build trust with our customers through caring and prompt service."
"Fast, reliable, and knowledgeable customer service."
"World's best customer service team."

Notice these examples use generic words, such as "prompt," "fast," and "world's best." What they don't do is focus on the results they are trying to achieve for the customer or how the customer benefits.

Many leaders whose teams write these statements know something isn't quite right, but they can't put their finger on it. This post will clarify what went wrong, and help you avoid making the same mistakes.

A group of colleagues putting their hands together to signal commitment and focus.

How to write a customer service vision statement

It's helpful to see an overview of the vision writing process before diving into what can go wrong. I won't go into too much detail in this post, so here are some links if you want to learn more:

There are three key steps in the process:

Survey all employees to get their input
Gather a cross-functional group of 7-10 people to write the statement
Check the statement with key stakeholders

I frequently see a problem at each stage in this process that can cause a vision statement to lack customer-focus. Let's explore each one in detail, and I'll explain how to solve each one.

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Mistake #1: Misinterpreting the survey results

The first step when writing a customer service vision statement is to survey all employees who will be covered by the statement. This could be a group of 10, 100, or even thousands of people.

The survey gives everyone a chance to provide some input that will later be used to guide the work of the small team writing the vision. Participants are asked to respond to one question:

“What do you want our customers to think of when they think of the service we provide?”

The survey answers are freeform. Responses can be used to generate a word cloud, which visually depicts which words are used most often.

A challenge occurs when the survey results are misinterpreted.

Here's an example from a team called the Clean Vehicle Rebate Project (CVRP). They were part of a larger nonprofit, but this particular team helped customers who purchased hybrid or "green" vehicles get rebates from the state that were designed to incentivize consumers to buy these types of vehicles.

The word cloud represents the responses from our employee survey:

Word cloud representing the output from an internal customer service vision survey.

You can see many generic words right there in bold, such as "friendly," "like," and "helpful." Vision writing teams are often tempted to put these words directly into the vision statement, so it might turn out like this:

We provide friendly and helpful service that customers like.

Yikes! That's a pretty generic statement that's uninspiring and definitely not focused on customers. It seems to be focused on getting customers to like the team, which should be a by-product of doing a great job.

The solution to this challenge is to go one level deeper. Go past the generic words that are large and bold and look at some of the secondary words that come out in the survey.

In this case, look at the words under the large "customers" on the left side of the word cloud. Here are a few that stand out:

Easy
Process
Resolve
Contact
Rebate

These words are more focused on what the team actually does—helping hybrid vehicle buyers get rebates. Now we have some additional insight to share in the vision writing meeting.

Mistake #2: Avoiding the good vision criteria

A good customer service vision statement should meet three tests. During the vision writing meeting, it's essential for the facilitator to use these tests to guide the group's work.

The three criteria for a good vision statement are:

It's simple and easily understood.
It's focused on customers.
It reflects both who you are now, and who you aspire to be in the future.

These criteria should be a failsafe against writing generic statements. For instance, let's imagine we completely whiffed on interpreting the CVRP's word cloud and came up with this generic first draft:

We provide friendly and helpful service that customers like.

Now let’s apply the three criteria to evaluate this draft:

#1 Is it simple and easily understood? No, the statement is overly generic. People who worked for this organization cared deeply about the environment. They saw the green vehicle rebate program as a way to get more people onboard with environmental issues, but the statement above doesn’t capture this.

#2 Is it focused on customers? Not really. The CVRP team truly wanted to get more customers driving "green" vehicles and knew the rebate program they supported was a way to do that.

#3 Does it reflect who we are now and our aspirations for the future? No, it does not. I like to ask teams to imagine the results they're achieving for their customers on a good day, when everything is going well. The vision statement should focus on doing more of that. A good day for the CVRP team would be getting more customers to invest in “green” vehicles.

It can sometimes required a skilled facilitator to bring out these issues in a vision writing meeting. This can be a compelling reason to hire an external professional.

Mistake #3: Ignoring your gut instinct

Customer service leaders often tell me they aren't happy with these generic vision statements that don't focus on customers. They getting a nagging feeling that something's not right.

The final mistake is ignoring that feeling and rolling out the vision anyway.

Part of the vision writing process is a final gut check. The idea is to share the finished statement with key stakeholders who did not help write it. These stakeholders can include executives, middle managers, and influential frontline employees.

A good vision statement will elicit an overwhelmingly positive reaction.

There are times when a draft statement doesn't get that reaction. Some organizational cultures discourage open criticism, but you can still tell there's a problem when people aren't effusive in their praise.

"It's okay," really means it's not okay.

As a facilitator, I like to ask probing questions to get to the heart of that feeling.

One group I worked with was a group of maintenance professionals who created a vision statement that read "We help you get it fixed."

The gut check didn't go so well. There was something about the statement that didn't sit well with stakeholders.

I asked them to share more about their reaction. Was it a particular word, for example?

It took a few questions to get to the heart of the issue, but finally someone spotted it. The word "you" in "We help you get it fixed" felt to employees as if they were putting too much responsibility on the customer.

The solution was taking out the word "you" so the statement became "We help get it fixed." The team loved it.

Don't be afraid to lean in if you write a vision statement that stakeholders don't love. Ask them to help pinpoint what they don't love about it and why. In my experience, it's usually just a word or two that needs changing.

Additional Resources

The CVRP team ultimately came up with a customer service vision statement that met all three criteria and everyone was passionate about.

Make it easy to join the clean vehicle movement.

They recognized that their customers might not be as passionate as they were, so the only way to get the masses to invest in clean vehicles was if the process was easy. So they re-focused their efforts on removing friction.

You can write a brilliant customer service vision statement, too. Here are a few resources to help.