The Secret to Creating and Sustaining Behavioral Differentiation
Written by admin on January 20, 2010 – 2:30 am -What is the secret to creating and sustaining behavioral differentiation? It’s just this: You have to manage your customers’ experiences from start to finish. You have to think about what they are experiencing at every touch point and then design interactions that surpass what they experience when they interact with your competitors. For your company to achieve this, you may need the operational discipline of an EMC or the strong service-oriented culture of a Ritz-Carlton. You may need the creativity and willingness to take risks that Kim Hansen showed at General American Telecom, and the commitment to employee training and education we saw at Southwest Airlines, Hall Kinion, and Men’s Wearhouse-or the professionalism and disciplined mentoring of a Heidrick & Struggles.
It takes skill and will to create and sustain BD. Both are important, but without the will, the skill won’t matter. So, although training and education are crucial, simply training people to behave well won’t make a lasting difference in how they treat customers. Behavioral differentiation does not happen serendipitously. It must be led. It won’t happen if leaders pay only lip service to it, and it won’t happen if leaders don’t walk the talk themselves. It won’t happen with signs and slogans alone. It requires a constant infusion of energy, focus, and direction from the leadership of the organization. In Chapter 9 we wrote about the three engines that drive BD: leadership, culture, and processes. To behaviorally differentiate yourself from your competitors, you need all three of these engines running smoothly.
We suspect that many leaders understand this but are unable to overcome the inertia of a culture in which people just do what it takes to get the job done or to surmount the resistance of entrenched managers who are too focused on internal matters to grasp and commit to behavioral differentiation as a way of being. We also suspect that many leaders themselves don’t get it. What makes most companies common and undistinguished is that it’s easy to become distracted by the day-to-day problems, the immediacy of the telephone ringing, and the urgency of yet another meeting to attend. Gustav Metzman, who was once president of the New York Central Railroad, observed how the tyranny of the here and now prevents us from doing what we really should be doing to build the future: “Most business men generally are so busy coping with immediate and piecemeal matters that there is a lamentable tendency to let the long run or future take care of itself. We often are so busy putting out fires, so to speak, that we find it difficult to do the planning that would prevent those fires from occurring in the first place. As a prominent educator has expressed it, Americans generally spend so much time on things that are urgent that we have none left to spend on those that are important”.[4]
To create or increase BD in your company, then, you need to avoid being sidetracked by the minutiae and distractions of the day-to-day business life. If you do not behaviorally differentiate yourself now, then a change program to develop BD is likely to require a significant effort, in part because behavioral changes are difficult and in part because the behaviors you may need to change are ubiquitous, involving not only direct interactions between your employees and your customers but also every indirect touch point. In At America’s Service, Karl Albrecht observed: “When the customer sees an advertisement for your business, that’s a moment of truth; it creates an impression. Driving by your facility is, for the customer, a moment of truth. Entering a parking lot, walking into a lobby and getting an impression of the place, receiving a bill or a statement in the mail, listening to a recorded voice on the telephone, getting a package home and opening it, all of these are events that lead to an impression of your service. The sum total of all of the possible moments of truth your customers experience, both human and nonhuman, becomes your service image”.[5] Albrecht is focusing on customer service, but it should be clear that his argument extends to the overall behavioral impression your company creates.
It’s important to keep in mind that you cannot avoid giving behavioral impressions to customers. You are always signifying by your behavior that you are either distinctly better than your competitors, or no different from your competitors, or distinctly worse than your competitors. Whether you like it or not, customers are always coming to one of those three conclusions about you. If you choose to ignore behavior as a potential source of competitive advantage, then at best you are likely to fall into the bland, undifferentiated middle hump of the behavioral bell curve (see Figure 3-1), and you will be outdistanced by your competitors who do differentiate themselves behaviorally. At worst, you will lose customers by falling into the negatively differentiated left side of Figure 3-1. Or you can be thoughtful and strategic about your behavior toward employees, customers, and other stakeholder groups and use behavior to differentiate yourself and gain competitive advantage. The choice is yours.
[4]Gustav Metzman, quoted in Ted Goodman, ed., The Forbes Book of Business Quotations: Thoughts on the Business of Life (New York: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 1997), p. 652.
[5]Karl Albrecht, At America’s Service (Homewood, Ill.: Dow Jones-Irwin, 1988), p. 27.
Taken From : Winning Behavior-What the Smartest, Most Successful Companies Do Differently
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