By Oluwole Dada
Last week, we started the conversation on your people as your brand. As a service provider, the members of your staff that deal with customers represent your organization and they must be given the best treatment especially because of your customers. They must be trained to be courteous, caring, empathetic, emotionally intelligent and sensitive to the needs of the clients. Your investment in the people who carry your brand to the customer will be seen by all and whatever that investment is, the customer experience will reflect it.
Singapore Airlines is widely regarded as the world’s best airline for decades. The Singapore Airlines brand was built, in large measure, on the ‘Singapore Girl’, the flight attendant who became the most recognizable service icon in commercial aviation. What most people do not know is the rigour behind that icon. Singapore Airlines invests approximately four months in training a cabin crew member before they ever step on a commercial flight. The training covers not just safety procedures and service protocols, but cultural sensitivity, emotional intelligence, and the art of reading a passenger’s state of mind.
Your Staff Presentation Is Not Vanity, but a Strategy
The way your staff dresses, speaks and projects himself carries real commercial weight. A customer forms an impression of your organization within the first few seconds of encountering your staff. Before a word is spoken, before a service is rendered, the customer has already begun to assess your organization. Are they well dressed? Do they look like they take this seriously? Do they seem glad to be here, or are they visibly enduring their job? These are not trivial observations. They are the raw materials from which trust is either built or broken. And trust, as I indicated earlier in the series, is the only true currency in a service business.
The Four Seasons Hotels brand is built on a simple but ruthlessly enforced operational principle: every staff member who is visible to a guest must be impeccably presented, deeply informed about the property, and capable of anticipating a guest’s need before it is articulated. This is not an accident of culture. It is the product of deliberate hiring, structured training, and a leadership philosophy that treats the front-line employee as the single most important person in the service delivery chain.
You may not be running a five-star hotel. You may be leading a customer service team in a telecommunications company, or managing the front desk of a regional operations team, or overseeing the teller operations of a bank branch. The scale is different, but the principle is identical. The people who face your customers are the living, breathing expression of every value your organization claims to hold. Dress them accordingly. Train them rigorously, and respect them enough to give them what they need to do the job well.
Richard Branson said, “If you take care of your employees, they will take care of your clients.” He built the Virgin Group which spans over 400 companies across aviation, hospitality, telecoms, and financial services on a management philosophy that inverted the traditional corporate hierarchy. Most organizations put shareholders at the top, then customers, then employees. Branson put employees first, on the explicit reasoning that a happy, valued, well-equipped employee will naturally deliver an exceptional customer experience, which will naturally produce the commercial outcomes that satisfy shareholders.
The implication for everyone reading this is that the quality of your customer experience is a direct reflection of how you treat the team delivering it. If your staff feel invisible, unappreciated, or disposable, your customers will feel exactly the same way. It is not a coincidence. It is cause and effect. Stephen Covey puts it this way: “Always treat your employees exactly as you want them to treat your best customers.”
Covey’s formulation takes Branson’s principle and makes it operational. It gives leaders a practical test they can apply to any decision involving their people: before I do this, would I do it to my best customer?
The Cross-Functional Implication
Before I close, I would like to address something that gets overlooked when people read articles like this. The customer experience is almost never the exclusive responsibility of the customer-facing team. It is the product of every function in the organization. The finance team that delays the processing of a customer refund. The IT team that leaves a customer-facing system down for hours without a workaround. The supply chain team that cannot deliver on the promise the sales team made. Every one of these functions contributes to the customer experience, positively or negatively, whether they are aware of it or not.
Oluwole Dada is the General Manager at SecureID Limited, Africa’s largest smart card manufacturing plant in Lagos, Nigeria.
