Businesses often claim they’re customer focused. It’s an easy statement to make, but in practice, it’s very hard to execute. Being customer focused requires the efforts of every employee at every level of the organization.
So, what is the secret to creating an exceptional customer service focused culture? The short answer: there isn’t one.
A strong company culture is built in stages and develops over a long period of time. It isn’t something you establish and forget about. It needs constant attention. It must be imbedded in everything you do. Most importantly, it must be monitored, protected, and driven by the senior leadership of the company. Yes, it takes a tremendous amount of time and energy. But it’s also one of the most neglected aspects of many businesses, especially those in the early stages of development, where so many daily tasks are often seen as more pressing or urgent.
At Whiskey House, we pride ourselves on providing exceptional customer service. In fact, we believe it is one of our most significant competitive advantages, and it’s the result of a very focused, thoughtful, and deliberate effort by everyone.
A strong customer service culture starts and ends with how you treat your team. If you want your employees to deliver exceptional customer service, you need to model behaviors that deliver those outcomes. For this reason, at our inception, we challenged the first 12 members of our team, to develop a statement of the company’s mission, vison, and values:
Mission: Through innovation and collaboration, we create exceptional customized American whiskey that builds sustained brand recognition for our exclusive partners.
Vision: Recognized as the global leader in transforming the contract American whiskey industry
Values: Integrity, Communication, Partner Focus & Innovation
We then used these core values as benchmarks to evaluate and hire the remaining 68 team members. Each day we challenge ourselves to embrace these values, and we hold ourselves accountable when we don’t. Next, we put together our budget and incentive plans. With complete transparency, we review our progress every month with the entire company. Through continuous training and in-depth sharing of customer information across everyone in the organization, we ensure every member of our team – no matter what level of the organization – understands all aspects of our business.
Most importantly, we believe that constant improvement is required. To this end, we recently had eight, first-year business students from the Sloan School of Management at MIT embed themselves at Whiskey House. They studied how we communicated with each other and our customers. After three months of in-depth evaluation, they provided us with a “McKenzie” level report offering suggestions on how to improve. Not only did we embrace their findings, but we also implemented all their recommendations. We could not be more grateful for their work.
This is just one example of the many on-going initiatives we have at Whiskey House. All are focused on helping us develop and foster a culture that delivers the best results and service for our customers.
Over the next several weeks, we’ll be exploring many achievements at Whiskey House that would not have been possible without the shared commitment of our team, who live our values each and every day!
