Your customer may be satisfied with your product or service, but are they satisfied with you? Do they see you as a valuable contributor to their success? Do they believe you understand and care about their needs? Do they see that your focus is to make them more successful? Do they turn to you for advice when new challenges and opportunities arise? Do you only talk to your customers when things go wrong, and they call your hotline? If you have a business-to-business company, your customers may not actually touch or experience your product daily. Your customers experiences are being driven by many interactions which either were the result of a problem with your service, or some other transactional or service item like billing or procedural changes. How would they describe their experience with your company?

A pure focus on operational excellence can cause you to miss the importance of the role of the human interaction between your employees and your customers. Your customers experience with your people over the lifetime of your relationships with them will have a tremendous influence on their perceptions about satisfaction, loyalty, and willingness to recommend your company. Indeed, those perceptions will have a direct impact on your opportunity to deliver more products and services to them. You must explicitly define, understand and influence the style of all of the interactions with your customers. Your real objective should be to build a unique relationship with your customers a relationship based on experiences, interactions, and explicit behaviors to build trust and community.

You may be thinking right now that your service or product is a commodity that can easily be replaced by a lower priced provider, so how can you build a unique relationship with customers? You may be investigating how to add more products or services to your portfolio to expand the reach or commitment your customers make to your company more relevant to more of your customers business. That may work, to a degree, but remember the key question about the customers experience with your company if that experience is not that great with one simple product, how will it be with multiple products?

How do you want your employees to behave with your customers, and how do you want customers to experience the interactions with your people? Does your company communicate and convey a particular personality in its brand promise, and through the behavior of all of your employees? Once youve decided on a core set of values and your brand promise, certainly all of the traditional attributes like professional and trustworthy and reliable and customer oriented are appropriate. But, they are foundational requirements of every company that is serving customers in your industry. Whats missing? A personality. These attributes are defined more by terms like bold, approachable, formal, fun, caring, casual, agreeable, conscientious, open, and energetic, amongst others. These attributes define the personality style that you would like your company to exhibit and the behaviors your customer will experience in their business relationships with you.

Lets say you defined your personality as bold, approachable, casual, and solutions oriented. How would your sales representatives conduct themselves at important pitches to new prospects? Would they wear dark blue pin striped suits with black brief cases and slick multi-media PowerPoint presentations? Would they deliver their presentation as a long deliberate scripted monologue and force the customer to wait until it was over before asking any questions or engaging in a dialog? Would they launch into a long pitch arrogantly assuming they know exactly what the customer wants before engaging in a conversation with the customer?

Hopefully, you answered no to all of these questions - if you want your sales representatives to behave in a manner consistent with your brand personality. What would your marketing literature and your web site look like? What style of writing would be used in marketing materials? Would it be college graduate level English in a very formal business-like tone, or would the language be conversational, informal, and designed for any 8th grade reader to understand. Most likely the answer is the latter. How would employees behave and dress at trade shows? What about the customer service center, how do they answer the phone and what is the message customers hear when they are put on hold?

The point is your personality must show up in both the appearance of your company in all of its physical representations as well as in the communication and behavior of every employee. Not every individuals unique personality, but rather the consistent personality of your company. I worked with a business transaction services provider that defined their brand personality as bold, energetic, friendly, and playful. Playful!?! Youre saying: But were a serious business delivering a serious service to our customers that directly affects their financial performance. How can we be playful?

Dont confuse excellent business operational performance with the behaviors and personality that defines the relationships between your employees and your customers. That transaction services company trained thousands of employees on how to be more open and friendly and to have fun at work with each other and with their customers. Their sales people did not use PowerPoint. Instead they would use props, dress in acting roles, and play puzzle games with their sales prospects. Engaging the customer in a fun game or interaction about their business up front is a very quick way to establish a rapport and to demonstrate that you know something about their business. More importantly it demonstrates that you are able to listen and be approachable.

Southwest Airlines has delivered industry leading performance and customer satisfaction for years and yet the experience that their customers have with their employees is fun, engaging, and casual. This behavior seems to be evident among many of the different types of employees that customers may interact with. There can be no doubt that they are highly focused on excellent operational performance yet their friendly personality helps to inspire confidence and a more relaxed flying experience for their customers. Im not suggesting necessarily that your company personality should be built on this style. Rather, I encourage you to stretch and be willing to consider attributes that may seem a little different than what youve experienced in your company or your industry. Nobody ever became unique by choosing to be just like everyone else.

The most important aspect in all this is to define and systematically implement the steps needed for the behavior of every employee (top to bottom, in that order) to match the personality you have selected. By focusing on the relationship with the customer, over and above the operational performance, you can establish a relationship that goes far deeper into the psyche and overall perception of your value to that customer. If you can create a personality that is unique from your competitors, and if you establish this deeper connection with your customer, you will have created a significant barrier for any competitor. Your customer will have to consider undoing a deep personal relationship with you, even though they might want that service for a nickel less. This buys you loyalty and time to respond to that competitors efforts from the inside where you have the greatest influence.