At Lexus, top executives talk with five customers a month.  It’s part of their intense focus on value, customer satisfaction and retention.

There is a big difference between “doing service” and “delivering experiences”.  If members/customers are not consistently taken aback and surprised by how great your experience is, then you are simply doing service rather than delivering an experience that will set your organization apart.  This leaves you with an important decision… either change your core strategy to emphasize convenience, price, or information/marketing – or make plans to revamp your experience so it is unparalleled.

Harvard Business Review published the top 10 management trends of the past decade.  See the post for yourself.  In related commentary they surmised that while the past decade may have been “the decade of the shareholder” – what’s just begun may be “the decade of the customer.”  There are strong signs that this is true – both as a backlash to the short-term profit mongering we have seen and in response to the overemphasis placed on shareholder value.

Get ready for lots of activity (and competition) as companies focus heavily on the member/customer value proposition.  If you choose to stick with a strategy focused on delivering great member/customer experiences, you’ve got an important question to answer:  What structures and workflow will help make your member/customer experience unparalleled?

Here are practical approaches taken by other organizations:

• Learn from other leaders.  Interview several CEOs who have built organizations that are ahead of yours; ask each of them the same questions.  Learn what they emphasize as important – and share them with your Board and management team.
• Go to the customer. As CEO or another executive, move your office into the lobby of a branch, where members/customers can stop by and interact with you.  See for yourself how unparalleled (or antiquated) your member/customer experience really is.
• Measure intangibles. Establish a high priority on monitoring and measuring member/customer experiences, staff productivity, and employee learning.  Integrate reports and dashboards for these metrics into the workflow of your ongoing, monthly meetings.
• Document workflow. Visually document all of the steps in your major member experience processes.  Be sure there is a box for every process step, then time several member service representatives actually completing the entire process.  Now go back (as a process team) and cut 30% to 50% of the average time (and member/customer hassle) out of the process.

As a rule, here’s the general progression for improving your business:  strategy… structure… workflow.  Establish a clear strategy, create structure for it across the organization, and create aligned and efficient workflow to implement.  Build in that order, then implement with measures – and you will get results.

For more resources, read the post Customer Experience Is Not About Coffee or dig in to books like The Experience Economy and The Loyalty Effect.