Directions: Care. Demonstrate. Repeat

The signs are huge and everywhere. Sometimes you don’t even have to look for them.

You can immediately tell if a company cares about its customers or not. And, given a choice most of us will choose a company that thinks about making our life or experience better, over a company that does not.

And how is caring demonstrated: thousands of different ways, some small and some not so small. The details can vary by industry, but you know them when you see or hear them.

Examples could include: making it easy to pay your bill, allowing you to easily find the information you want on a website, having clean bathrooms, having loving frontline employees, or having clear signage.

What needs to be apparent is that the company has been intentional about considering what the customer experience is like AND then comparing that to what the preferred customer experience should be.

In reality, caring companies all come from one source – caring people. My initial thought is that you can’t teach a person to care…just like a basketball coach can’t coach ‘tall’. But I am reconsidering my initial thought, at least for now.

The only hope a non-caring person has is to slip through the hiring cracks and get hired by a company with a caring culture so strong that it engulfs them. But, if they don’t catch on quickly, the company could just as easily spit them back out.

Some might argue that not every person in a company needs to be caring. They might say that frontline, customer service and human resource staff are the only ones that need to be caring souls. They might say that accounting or senior management doesn’t need to care about customers the same way.

I would agree that they don’t need to demonstrate caring the same way, but they need to care – a lot MORE than frontline and customer service staff. Why? Because they make policy and then assure that it is followed. They develop training programs and they provide incentives to staff with praise and wage increases. They set the tone and build the culture.

So if you want to go far in a company or get your start in the world of work be sincere about caring for people and demonstrate how you HAVE and how you WILL bring those vital skills to your role.