Aaron Hoos

A friend of mine works at a Starbucks not too far from my house. I’ve known him for several years and he became a barista at Starbucks maybe a year or two ago.

Well, earlier this week he was rushed to the hospital because his lung collapsed. He’s been at the hospital ever since, sometimes returning home but frequently staying at the hospital overnight for observation. He seems to be doing okay, although we’re not yet sure why his lung collapsed.

Now here’s what shocked me: I just found out today that some of his Starbucks customers came to visit him in the hospital.

That’s impressive customer loyalty! In fact, that goes beyond customer loyalty to a true relationship!

Loyal customers are profitable customers. They buy again and again with very little prompting, and they talk up the business to others.

HOW CUSTOMER LOYALTY IS CREATED
I’ve found that creating customer loyalty is rarely something that happens at the business level. It happens at the employee level. Customers may become loyal to businesses (and a lot of Starbucks customers are loyal to Starbucks!), but customers more frequently and more easily become loyal to the people in those businesses.

So, are you helping your employees create customer loyalty?

• Give your employees the freedom to stop and chat with customers. By comparison, a lot of retail-based companies take the approach “if you have time to lean, you have time to clean”, and their staff rush around cleaning instead of pausing for a moment to strike up a conversation with a customer. The downside is that your employees might not get that counter as clean as you’d like it. The upside is higher profitability from customers who feel that they have a relationship with the person behind the counter.
• Give your employees the tools to strike up a meaningful conversation and build a relationship. Not everyone is socially savvy, so a few conversation starters is a good way to help your employees.
• Give your employees the freedom to go the extra mile for customers. They do anyway (everyone learns how to game the system to give a little extra to those extra-special customers) so why not help them by giving them lots of ideas.
• Give your employees the authority to fix mistakes. Nothing takes away from loyalty-building like an employee who says, “I have to call my manager to fix that for you.” Help them know what challenges they will likely face and what an adequate response those challenges might be, then give them the authority to fix it.
• Give your employees a reason to be proud of the company they work for. Do good things; make a good product; strive for high quality; smile a little and try to brighten your employees’ days.

When you have employees who love where they work and are empowered to fix things and have the freedom to build relationships, they will create massive amounts of customer loyalty.

THERE ARE RISKS TO CREATING CUSTOMER LOYALTY
There’s are risks that comes with this employee-specific customer loyalty, and I think that employers are so afraid of the risks that they skip the loyalty-creating ideas I’ve listed above.

The risks include:

• Employees who create customer loyalty and are empowered to do so become more marketable and therefore potentially less loyal to an employer.
• Customers who are loyal to employees may move with an employee if that employee quits and moves to a new business. We see this happening in industries like beautician/hairdressing, where someone moves to a different salon and advertises that old customers are welcome at the new salon.
• Employees could abuse the additional freedom (intended for relationship-building) or authority (intended to fix problems).

These are risks, but the downside created by these risks can be mitigated with fair pay, empowering management, and an enjoyable work environment. Sometimes you will get employees leaving, customers following them, and employees abusing the system. But more often than not, you’ll get customers who become fiercely loyal to the employees who serve them.

How loyal are your customers? Are they so loyal that they would visit one of your employees in the hospital?

Growing businesses face a variety of challenges, from scaling distribution to hiring and training competent staff.

A knowledge center can help to minimize the pain that comes with growth.

A knowledge center is an offline or online area in your business where you capture and store all of your best practices, procedures, processes, and more. It is a single repository of information to enable effective operations.

It’s a place where your staff can go to find the latest and most relevant information and resources to help them do their job. Instead of running here for one thing and over there for another, you can keep it all together in a single knowledge center.

Your knowledge center might start quite humbly, with just a document or two, but as your business grows, your knowledge center can grow with it.

Hiring a technical writer to help you create and/or improve and/or moderate your knowledge center may seem like an investment in a non-core asset. However, with the right structure and attention, your knowledge center can deliver the following benefits:

• Less time wasted as staff go searching for an answer.
• Faster redeployment time when you change a process and need to change the instructions, guidelines, and policies that accompany that process.
• Lower training costs — knowledge centers support training and sometimes even replace it. Moreover, HR can rely on knowledge centers as a starting point for training that they perform.
• Improved managing: Management moves out of “how-to-do-it” training mindset into a “how-to-do-it-better” mentoring mindset.
• Processes become streamlined for an improved customer experience and potentially lower costs throughout the organization.

Here are some tips to build and maintain a useful knowledge center:

• Don’t start from scratch. You probably already have user manuals and job descriptions you can add
• Keep it simple: Create a blog but make it private (require a sign-in).
• Train your staff to refer to the knowledge center first, before they go up the chain of command.
• Record every question you are asked and add it to the knowledge center.
• Assign on person to be in charge of your knowledge center. Task them with the responsibility maintaining and regularly updating the information.
• Get your staff to record the procedures they perform and add them to the knowledge center.
• As your company grows, start dividing your knowledge centers up and give each department their own knowledge center to maintain.
• Over time, review the content and remove or modify obsolete information.

During my career in sales, and during my stockbroker and MBA studies, I encountered both role-plays and case studies as tools for teaching and learning. Later, as a writer who occasionally writes training content, I have the opportunity to use both. I always prefer case studies. Here’s why:

Role-plays are good in theory and they are supposed to give the learners practical experience in a safe learning environment. For example, in both my sales and stockbroker training, the role-plays we had to do were always about elements in the selling process (like how to uncover needs, how to transition, how to close, etc.).

Case studies offer a scenario (theoretical or historical) that outlines the situation and presents a problem that the learner must solve. For example, in my stockbroker studies and my MBA studies, I read numerous case studies where I had to identify the best investment portfolio mix or perform financial analysis or uncover an organizational problem.

WHY CASE STUDIES ARE BETTER
The problem is, role-plays are usually conducted by like-minded people for a single purpose and to exercise a single skill or technique. For example, the role-plays I experienced were conducted between two salespeople (one acting as the customer, the other as the seller). In role-plays about overcoming objections, both parties were already convinced of the value of the product and the person playing the customer gave half-hearted objections that were easily countered with by-the-book responses from the seller. Role-plays, you might say, are too neat and tidy. Role-plays become a way to parrot the best practice rather than develop a skills.

Case studies, on the other hand, push the learner to learn. Case studies, especially those drawn from real life, are complex and messy and sometimes there is more than one possible answer… and sometimes there are problems that cannot be solved. Case studies push the learner to go deeper, to get creative, to bring all of their skills to bear on the situation to arrive at a solution. Case studies aren’t “safe” and there is a lot of room for error. But I like them because they require all skills to be used.

IN MY DEFENSE
[Some of you might point out that role-plays and case studies teach completely different skills: That role-plays maybe teach the mechanics of a solution while case studies might offer a more theoretical application. But I disagree. Most of the occasions that I've encountered role-plays and case studies (and I've encountered them both as a learner and as a writer) they were used in similar ways: To teach a particular methodology, whether that methodology was breaking the ice, overcoming objections, analyzing a business problem, or performing financial analysis. The occasions when a role play serves a different role is when it is meant to build a skill-set through repetition. In those cases I would use the term "practice" instead of role-play.]

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR BUSINESS OWNERS?
When you develop training for your employees, consider carefully the tools you’ll use to teach them. I don’t believe that role-plays are nearly as effective as case studies.

Identify the skills or methodology you want to teach and create case studies that require those skills or methodology to solve. Add other details — sometimes to act as red herrings and sometimes as a “foothold” for your learners to use to solve the situation. Encourage creative solutions but make sure that they are paying attention to the details of the case study.

Teaching your people in a way that requires them to use all of their skills to creatively solve a problem is the best way to create an effective workforce. Case studies help you do that.