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If your job involves selling something for a living, you already know the importance of making customers feel listened to and cared for. So why up the ante and engage in what restaurateur Will Guidara calls “unreasonable hospitality”? Because being relentless in making others feel valued might be your best competitive advantage – especially in a business landscape stuffed with competitors constantly offering the latest and greatest version of your product or service. Luckily, being “unreasonable” doesn’t have to be draining; it can be creative, generative, and even systematizable.
Unnecessarily long waiting times, excessive paperwork, confusing interfaces — these are all examples of what professor Cass Sunstein calls “sludge”: the everyday bureaucracy and “frictions that separate people from what they want to get.” A certain amount of this muck is unavoidable. But organizations can enhance their employees’ and customers’ experiences by reducing sludge wherever possible.
Tiffani Bova argues, “The fastest way to get customers to love your brand is to get employees to love their job” — that’s the heart of the experience mindset. You can’t expect customers to have a good experience if the employees who serve them are having a bad one. So she encourages leaders not to over-prioritize customer satisfaction at the expense of employee satisfaction. The goal, according to Bova, should be integrating customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX) if you’re aiming for predictable growth.
Saying you “put the customer first” might score you some goodwill points. But Dan Rosensweig, president and CEO of Chegg, knows firsthand that living that mantra will simplify your decision-making process and clarify which parts of your business to emphasize and which to redirect.