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My friend, Sarah, is a baker.
She's taught me that baking is all about precision. You have to follow the recipe precisely to get the expected result. The outcome might be disappointing if you're off on your measurements, omit an ingredient, or fail to bake at the right temperature.
Even the smallest changes can make a difference.
For example, Sarah's famous peanut butter cookies taste a lot more buttery if she lets the butter warm up to room temperature before mixing it into the cookie dough. (Note to self: ask Sarah for more peanut butter cookies.)
Baking is an important metaphor for building a service culture.
A lot of leaders discover The Service Culture Handbook, and pick and choose which concepts they want to try. Inevitably, they're disappointed with the results.
Just like baking, you need to follow the recipe if you want a strong service culture.
Sarah Levine baking a pirate ship birthday cake.
Why picking and choosing steps doesn't work
The customer service leader was stuck.
She found my phone number in The Service Culture Handbook (page xiii) and sent me a text. Service leaders often call, text, or email me for advice. These conversations help me learn about the challenges they face implementing a customer-focused culture.
This particular leader was trying to write a customer service vision for her company.
A vision is a shared definition of outstanding customer service that gets everyone on the same page. It's the cornerstone of a customer-focused culture and the focal point of the entire book.
She had a good idea of what the vision should communicate, but was struggling to get the words just right. I asked her a few questions about the process she was following and learned she was trying to write it on her own.
I’ve called this the biggest mistake when writing a vision.
The process outlined in the book is an inclusive one. It solicits input from all employees, and the relies on a cross-functional group of senior leaders, middle managers, and individual contributors to write the statement. It’s designed to avoid blind spots by getting multiple perspectives.
When leaders skip steps in the process, like writing the vision on their own, they inevitably struggle:
The vision statement ends up full of empty marketing jargon.
Employees don't buy-in.
Months are spent on a process that should take two weeks.
Getting buy-in, maintaining momentum, and seeing real change is difficult. Skipping steps won't make it any easier.
The leader and I talked through the process. We reviewed the steps together and she came up with a plan. It was tough for her—she instinctively wanted to do things a different way.
But she stuck with it and followed the recipe.
In the end, she and her team created a vision statement that everyone was proud of. The vision was a simple sentence that described the culture and captured the company’s aspirations for being even more customer-focused in the future.
How was the service culture process created?
This is a fair question. Many customer service "experts" are guilty of creating advice out of thin air and then passing it off as wisdom without acknowledging that it's untested.
Here I took another lesson from Sarah.
Sarah does a lot of experimenting when she creates a new recipe. She tries new ideas, makes adjustments, and keeps working until the recipe is perfected.
Then she tries to make it even better.
I created the service culture process based on my work as an internal training director and then later as a consultant. It's been developed over the course of 20 years after working with hundreds of leaders and thousands of employees.
When I wrote the book, I researched customer-focused companies I admired, but had not worked with. I talked to leaders and experts, and further refined the process based on what I learned from them.
The process has been proven to work.
But I’m not satisfied. I continue to make adjustments based on feedback I receive from leaders. For example, I've recently changed the name of the customer service vision to "customer experience vision." It's a small change that makes an important distinction.
Is this the only way to build a service culture?
Of course not!
There are a lot of recipes for peanut butter cookies. Sarah's are the best I've tasted, but there are other recipes that make pretty good cookies as well.
The important distinction here is if you want to make Sarah's peanut butter cookies, you had better follow Sarah's recipe precisely.
Building your service culture is the same way. Pick a proven recipe and stick to it and you're more likely to get a great result.