10 Uncommon Annual Planning Actions that Drive Customer and Employee Growth

Today’s post is by Jeanne Bliss, author of Chief Customer Officer and I Love You More than My Dog (CLICK HERE to get your copies).

Annual planning is the Achilles heel of driving a united customer culture. Every silo or department determines how much money they have to spend, then each creates their individual plans and correlating score cards. Activities frequently focus only on the money – not on the behavior of the organization and what they want to stand for and show up as in the marketplace – based on their decisions and actions.

As you begin your annual planning cycle, here are 10 actions that business leaders and their organizations should focus on first – before the financial planning cycle – to increase customer loyalty and drive profitable business growth.

1. Believe in the integrity of your customers. The majority of business policies and rules are created to protect business from the minority of customers. Be bold, like Connecticut Griffin Hospital, which began sharing hospital records with patients and saw claims against the hospital drop by more than 43 percent. Take a leap of faith and believe that trust is reciprocated by customers when they feel that you trust them.

2. Invest in employee trust. Show your employees that you believe in them. Beloved company Wegmans invests in its employees by training them in the skills that remove rules, regulations, policies, and procedures that pen employees in. This enables Wegmans to throw away the rule book and live by this one edict: “No customer goes away unhappy.” As a result, its margins are higher and profitability more steady because the grocer’s turnover is only 7 percent of employees versus the 19 percent average in its industry.

3. Practice democratic decision making. Give good ideas a chance to prosper no matter where they come from in your organizational chart. Innovation and marketplace differentiation come when employees are respected as part of achieving a mission greater than their set of tasks. W.L. Gore has become a $2.7 billion dollar company, and earned a place on Fortune magazine’s best companies to work for list since its inception, because of how the company unleashes its employees’ spirit and ideas.

4. Grow and invest in customers as a primary asset of your business. Talk about customers lost and gained in real numbers, not percentages, to illustrate the vast number of lives your business impacts. Understand what drives customers out your door, as well as their long-term potential. Zane’s Cycles in Connecticut has experienced more than 20 percent growth every year for 29 years, with 45 percent margins because the retailer never loses sight of the fact that its customers’ average lifetime value is $12,500. Valuing customers makes it easy to make decisions about how to treat them.

5. Know your power source for bonding with customers. Regularly connect with customers, not only through surveys and other feedback mechanisms, but also as they experience your products and services. Take a page from Trader Joe’s, which uses employee taste buds at its testing kitchens, customer “tasting stations” in stores and sales performance to determine products they stock. Trader Joe’s generates $1,300 in sales per square foot–twice the supermarket industry average.

6. Have clarity about how you uniquely serve customers’ lives. Unite your operation to ensure that decisions connect to deliver an experience customers want to repeat and tell others about. This ties cross-silo decision making together and releases the organization from excess bureaucracy. IKEA, for example, designs the price tag first because employees at all levels know that the store serves customers who have less money than sweat equity, so are willing put together their items themselves at home.

7. Deliberately walk in your customers’ shoes. You need to know your customers’ life to serve their life. Yet as people rise through the ranks or even join organizations, orientation is often more about process and policy than learning about the customer at the heart of the business. Be deliberate in establishing a process for new hires, such as insurer USAA, which require new “recruits” to wear the flak jacket and helmet that many of their enlisted customers wear and to read their letters. Ninety eight percent of its customers stay with them year after year.

8. Make employee selection one of your most important decisions. Select your employees as you would customers: for lifelong value. At Chick-fil-A, operators and employees are selected based on their values, ability to build grow and sustain partnerships in all areas of their lives, and then their technical skills. As a result, Chick-fil-A has operator turnover of just 5 percent, and the fast-food chain just achieved 43 years of consecutive sales growth.

9. Proactively solve mistakes when they occur. When mistakes happen (and they will) get out in front of customers and admit the flaw; then make peace with your customers. Southwest Airlines reviews every flight every day to know when delays interrupted their customers’ lives and whether it was the airline’s fault or not. The company contacts customers to explain what happened and, when warranted, sends out LUV bucks for a future flight. Being proactive earned Southwest a net revenue increase of $1.9 million in 2011.

10. Accept the order and the accountability. In a world where customers are using social channels as a megaphone to broadcast the experience you’re delivering, invest in reliability. Don’t make the customer wonder where the order is, how long until it gets there, or what happens when it backorders. If a customer can’t tell another customer what they get from you, how they get it, or how it feels when they receive it, then you don’t have a story to tell (at least not one you want heard). Investing in reliability earns you the right to grow.

Companies that grow do so because their customers and employees are an army of advocates for them. They earn the right to their customers’ raves because they deliberately make decisions that move their operations in the direction of their customers and employees. Don’t lose another year of opportunity by letting annual planning pass by without considering these important commitments.

– Jeanne Bliss spent 25 years reporting to the Presidents of Lands’ End, Allstate, Mazda, Coldwell Banker and Microsoft Corporations leading customer experience as their Chief Customer Officer. Today she runs CustomerBliss – a consulting firm to help executive teams unite their actions to drive customer growth. She is the co-founder of the Customer Experience Professional’s Association. Her two best-selling books are “Chief Customer Officer: Getting Past Lip Service to Passionate Action” and “I Love You More than My Dog: Five Decisions that Drive Extreme Customer Loyalty in Good Times and Bad.”