Keep keeping your customer promise

To increase demand and margins, you need to do three things.

First, figure out your differentiated promise to your customers and make sure it's about them and the value you bring.

Second, define quality based on that promise, so you can keep what you promise. Got it so far?

The third thing is to change continuously and gradually improve your ability to deliver on that promise. That ability defines your chances of creating a spiral of bigger and better assignments, more successful deliveries, and happier customers who spread the word.

It sure is hard to keep keeping a customer promise!

Building capability in B2B service companies is extra tricky for a few reasons:

• You spend your time solving your customers' problems. Every hour spent sharpening your tools is an hour not spent using them and earning revenue.
• Your team is spread out in various contexts (with their clients), allowing fewer touchpoints for training and knowledge-sharing. As a manager, you probably practice your leadership face-to-face once a week, tops.
• Your services are highly customizable. You adapt to your customers' needs and wants, which is good. But by always saying “yes!” you risk watering down the essence of your core capabilities to mediocre blandness.

But you don’t improve your ability to deliver on your customer promise because it is easy. You do it because it is hard! And if you do it and your competition doesn’t, you’ll prove your worth and your demand and margins… well, they’ll increase!

7 ways to keep keeping your customer promise

Here are seven pieces of advice for continuously and gradually increasing your ability to keep keeping your customer promise.

1. Focus on your differentiating capabilities. You didn’t go through the hassle of defining your differentiating customer promise just to start treating those skills like any other. If all the tools in your toolbox are dull but equally important, the sharpening will fall behind. Make sure your differentiating capabilities are always your sharpest tools!
2. Dare to be repetitive in learning. If it’s your differentiating capability, it deserves to be repeated and revisited often! If it feels cringeworthy to talk about it again, then maybe it’s not your true differentiating capability. And while the subject is the same, the ways of learning are endless. Be creative and put the knowledge to work, practicing what you preach!
3. Integrate and create synergies across domains. The whole organization needs to be on board. Sales, talent acquisition, delivery and marketing all have the same overarching problem to solve: delivering on your customer promise. Ensure you speak the same language, learn from each other, and tell the same story.
4. Make customer feedback your religion and empower teams to act on it. In a learning organization, it is everyone's job to listen to customers and transform what they hear into shareable and actionable insights internally.
5. Learn to say no! If you lag behind on the customer experience because you promise to do things you don’t want to do or don’t do well, then stop doing them. I know this is hard. You need to put food on the table tomorrow, not months from now, when your focus starts paying off. But remember that watering down your differentiating capability comes at a price.
6. Keep variance in check! Tailoring your delivery to your customers' requests is a slippery slope. Find ways to optimize your customer experience around your differentiating capabilities. Standardize your methodology, limit the scope, or provide a few packaged services for various contexts.
7. Make sense and improve continuously. Your customers' demands will vary over time, so your ability to deliver on them needs to adapt. Regular sensemaking sessions or retrospectives make it easy to stay on top of changes, learn from experience, and detect early warning signs of needed adaptation.

Make a promise to yourself, and start keeping it

Keeping your customer promise starts with making a promise to yourself: to start keeping to keep your customer promise today—and keep keeping it. Are you committed to keeping that promise?

Anders Wengelin
CEO, Partner and Management Consultant