Leveraging Leadership

Mapping Contributions: How Every Team Member Affects Customer Satisfaction

• Emily Sander • Season 1 • Episode 148

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This episode of Leveraging Leadership focuses on defining the customer using three key questions. Emily Sander, Chief of Staff, discusses how crucial it is for everyone to understand their impact on the customer and what the customer really, REALLY wants. 

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Who Am I?
If we haven’t yet before - Hi👋 I’m Emily, Chief of Staff turned Executive Leadership Coach. After a thrilling ride up the corporate ladder, I’m focusing on what I love - working with people to realize their professional and personal goals. Through my videos here on this channel, books, podcast guest spots, and newsletter, I share new ideas and practical and tactical tools to help you be more productive and build the career and life you want. 


Time Stamps:
00:32 Defining the Customer in Balanced Scorecard
01:04 Question 1: Considering ALL Customers
03:15 Question 2: Understanding Customer Needs
04:38 Question 3: Company-Wide Customer Awareness

Speaker 2:

In this episode, we are continuing our discussion of how to operationalize strategy through the lens of balanced scorecard. And here, we're going to talk about a key differentiator. In the balanced scorecard methodology, which is all about defining the customer. And a lot of people and a lot of organizations throw out like customer first or customer centricity, and that's all well and great, but like, no one knows what that actually means and no one knows how to do it. So let's go into three questions that you can ask yourself and whether or not you're doing balanced scorecard or not. I think these are very valid and useful, questions to ask yourself and your team. So three questions here. First question, are you considering all of your customers? Do you know all of your customers or do you just talk about the kind of traditional customer people think about the external, customer? Like we serve, um, dentists in Montana or whatever. So if that's your customer, that's great do that, but you also might have other customers. A big one I see missed are internal customers. So, internal teams. You could have a setup where you might have shared services, like shared services teams, that are supporting and supplying um, deliverables, or solutions, services, or information to other internal teams within that same organization. But just how it's structured, you can think like team one, the shared services team, can think about um, team two as their quote unquote customer. So in terms of balanced scorecard, in team one's balanced scorecard, the customer perspective might be geared toward team two, and that's technically an internal team within that same company. Um, so that can be a customer. You can also think about channel partners or strategic partners or important vendors, supply chain lines, things like this. I've also been a part of teams Let's say there's four teams and all four teams are directly interacting with the external customer. Kind of what we traditionally think about as the customer. So all four teams are customer facing, but internally there's dependencies and there's a handoff that has to happen smoothly between those four teams. So it's kind of like a relay race. So you see like, uh, at the Olympics, like the track, the track people who, um, they run one lap and then hand off the baton to their teammate who runs the next lap. It's kind of like that sequence internally. And so you might have two customers in that sense. You might have the external customer, and then you also might have an internal team that you have to hand the baton off to smoothly in order to do your job well. So when you think about it, Through all those lenses and all those perspectives, are you considering all of your customers or do you just have one on the board? All right, question two here. Do you know what your customer really wants? So do you know what they really, really want to quote the Spice Girls from the nineties? Do you know what they want or do you know what they really, really want? A lot of people can recite what they think the customer should want. Or they can tell you what their boss says the customer wants. Therefore, we try to deliver that to the customer. But do you know what the customer actually wants? Do you know what helps them make their life easier and their day better? Do you know what solutions would actually be helpful for them in the longterm? So thinking ahead and being proactive of just what's right in front of you. or what's right in front of the client. How can you solve this problem, um, before it even happens for them? How can you be a partner that sets them up for long term success? So all these different things. Do you know what the customer really wants? The easiest, most straightforward way to answer this question? Is to ask them. So you can ask them in surveys, you can ask them, um, in QBRs, you can ask them in, monthly, calls with their account manager, or quarterly onsites, or what have you, if you have an executive sponsor who can get in touch and be like, hey, you know, we're delivering this, this, and this. And we think that's good, but we'd like to hear from you, like, what do you actually see on the ground from your perspective? What would be really helpful to you? What do you really want? Third question, does every person in my company know what the customer wants and how their work affects the customer? So how their individual day to day work affects the customer. You can think through your team and say, Hmm, I could people answer this question. If it's like, yes, arousing. Yes. Then great job. Keep doing whatever you're doing. If you're like, Ooh, yeah, I don't know about this whole team or I don't know about these folks. they should be able to know how their work contributes and connects to serving their customer. And again, if they're on a team that supports another internal team, that's great to understand that. It's also, I've seen like a lot of, um, Kind of hierarchy within an organization where teams that don't directly speak to the external customer are seen as like second class citizens, or like, we're going to like, you're just one of the support teams, you support us. And we do. The big work. We do the glamorous work that really matters, which is customer facing. And I'm like, like, that's not, that's not an accurate nor helpful way to think about that. And so asking yourself this question is every person in the company know how their work affects the customer can break down some of those things. Um, mapping that out is also helpful for all the teams to see. So let me try to like, an example would be. Like accounting doesn't, well, in collections, they, I guess they interact with customers, but let's say like a, like a financial analyst who doesn't, um, regularly interact or interface with the external customer, yet they provide a critical function for the internal teams, which the other internal teams could not provide the support they could to the external customer. So that financial analyst, they might be. Only or just in quotes, crunching numbers and delivering data market research, or all these different, analyses they do to the various internal teams, but the internal teams would be flying blind or making ill informed decisions without that information. And so that financial analyst is critical. And so if you can map. How, what the financial analyst does, how their work affects the customer or customers in this case, it might be mapped to the internal customer and then all the way to the external customer. I think that's helpful. I think it's helpful for that financial analyst to know like, Hey, like my work matters. And here's exactly how, here's how it affects the other teams. it's also helpful for the other team members to go, Oh, that's how, okay. Like the financial analyst does that, but yeah, really, it does extend all the way out to our end user or, Oh, that financial analyst interacts with me and provides me this information. Oh, I didn't know they were doing that for this other team. Okay. Or I didn't know that they were actually, um, working with, like our, uh, potential MNA partners or strategic channel partners. Like I didn't know they were doing that. Oh, okay. It's just helpful for people to, to see those connections. Another way this can come about is we had, we had some teams that were very siloed from each other and there was no ill will per se amongst them. They just like, didn't know what happened after they were done with their part of the work. And so we had what we called the more, you know, sessions, which were really fun. And, uh, I hosted a few of these and then we had several other team members from various teams host a few of these. And basically we would pick a topic. And sometimes it would be just an overview of their team, but more often it would be a specific part of what they did or specific asks or questions we would be getting from other teams like, Hey, like once we do this and hand it off, like what exactly happens? Um, or like, what, why do you ask for our data in this particular format or this particular delivery method? And so the team receiving that information. would do a, the more, you know, session about, Hey, when we get this information, here's our workflow. And here's how we package this up and deliver it to, um, X, Y, and Z, uh, internal team or X, Y, and Z external customer. And those sessions, those, the more, you know, sessions were super helpful and enlightening to people where it's like, Oh, you could just see it here on faces and in voices like. Oh, that's what you do. And that's why you you're asking me for this information that way. I just kind of set off a light bulb. And, you know, even if that was just the case where they just saw the context and they saw the handoff points and had greater knowledge and visibility into the process, that was great. That was phenomenal. Sometimes we would get things like, Oh, well, hold on. So if, if I'm delivering this information to you and you're using it for that, wouldn't you want this other type of information too? And the team that was receiving the information would be like, Wait, is that a thing? Like, you can do that? Oh, yeah, like we can definitely, we would do it like this and this and this and pull it from this data source and this database and slice and dice it like this and we could put it in a spreadsheet format just so it goes directly into the system that's ingesting that. You don't have to manipulate that and you would have the additional data points that seem to be helpful. Oh, okay. Like boom, boom, boom. Like that's that, that was like money. That was gold in these, the more, you know, sessions. So anyway, all to say third question here, does every person in your company know what the customer wants and how their work affects them? Okay. So quick recap and takeaways for you. Ask yourself these three questions. Are you considering all your customers? Do you know what your customer really wants? Does every person in your company know what the customer wants and how their work directly affects the customer? If you have answered yes to all these questions, ding, ding, ding, ding, you win. Keep doing whatever you're doing. If you're like, ooh, yeah, okay Emily, those are great questions. We're 0 for 3. Then you know what some next steps might look like. most people are like, hey, like we have one out of three. We have two out of three. We're kind of working on the third one, but it still kind of gives you some direction and some guidance. On what you can spend your time and attention on. All right. So ask yourself those three questions. Continue asking yourself those questions because these questions and answers evolve and change over time as. Customers and people and circumstances changed, but they're good questions to ask to really solve Um, if you want to be truly customer centric or truly caring about your customer and serving your customer well, you have to have these things top of mind and you have to go a little bit deeper than surface level. Yeah, we're customer first or yeah, of course we care about our customer. So ask yourself these questions. Ask your teams these questions because they might have ideas and information that you might not have thought of. and, um, we'll put a wrap on this episode and I will catch you next time on Leveraging Leadership.