Want loyalty leading behavior from your team? Show it

Every member of The Vanguard Group's management team must man the telephones. That's right, every executive in the company is licensed and trained so they can provide overflow capacity during periods of peak call volumes. While it's not an everyday occurrence, they call everyone to the phones pretty regularly during tax season or around market disruptions.

I don't know about you, but I'm pretty sure I would be "slightly" less capable than a seasoned rep at executing trades, setting up accounts, creating transfer orders and so on. So, without intending to demonstrate any lack of respect for the leaders at Vanguard, I guess I'd prefer a regular rep. Nevertheless, their approach, which they call "Swiss Army" (because, like in Switzerland, everyone must serve when called) is brilliant. Vanguard, which has grown to become the largest fund company, is a true loyalty leader, consistently earning higher NPS than their direct competitors and showing the profitable share gain that goes with NPS leadership.

Why is Swiss Army so cool?

• Adds capacity at the peak, reducing call wait times and improving responsiveness to customers
• Sends a very clear message to the entire company about the importance of serving customers
• Provides real-life experience serving customers to the entire management team, which develops true customer intimacy and real empathy for employees serving customers on the front line

In addition, Vanguard has a fairly rigorous closed loop feedback process powered by the Net Promoter approach. A recent winner of Forrester's Voice of the Customer award, the company is a true learning machine, providing feedback and coaching to team members based on the experiences their customers report and working hard to improve policies, processes, products and pricing to deliver the best possible value to customers.

Contrast this with another company with a long history of great customer service and a stated mission of being a world leading brand, but a rapidly narrowing lead over its competitors. This company has an outstanding closed loop feedback process, used extensively with front line employees. And senior leaders generally say they are committed to customers.

Here's the thing, however. While the service group measures, manages and works hard to improve NPS, the marketing, product development, IT and leadership teams don't consistently support the effort. New products are so complicated to service they create horrendous customer experiences. New customer acquisition relies on discounts and freebies, which brings in large numbers of customers who don't really value what the company does best (so, eventually, they leave). Worse, the high volumes of new, churning customers result in very high workloads for the service teams, distracting them from the high value customers and sapping the organization of financial and other resources they need to earn enthusiastic recommendations.

Unlike Vanguard, the leaders at this company are not trained to man the phones. In fact, when it was suggested that each senior leader make just two phone calls a month to Detractors, the executives pushed back. "We simply don't have time to do that."

Really?

Here's my simple recommendation: If you want your employees to get closer to customers -- if you want to accelerate profitable, sustainable organic growth by earning the enthusiastic recommendation of your customers -- then model the behavior. Get on the phone. Commit the time. Lead from the front.

Honestly, it makes me angry when a leader tells me he or she is fully committed to customer advocacy, but "can't personally commit the time" required.