CIO Solutions: No Client Left Behind
By Erik Egolf, CEO
Managing our first wave of company growth was an exciting time for us. The challenge ahead of us was clear, we had a large contract and hence a large customer to “onboard” –– larger than anyone at the company had experience with. In my mind, the lack of experience didn’t concern me, as I knew we had the right people that would figure out how to be successful. My once major concern, instead, was that focusing on the large contract would take our eyes off our existing customer base and possibly cause premature customer attrition. In our business, customer relationships are gold and our reputation in the local community paramount, so we needed a way to mitigate any risk of existing customer loss. Little did I know that the solution we came up with would be a barometer of our company culture and set the tone for the next couple of years.
We decided to have a quarterly theme, thanks to Verne Harnish, titled “No Client Left Behind.” The concept was that everyone in the company had relationships with our customers that should not be neglected. Accordingly, we gave each department specific weekly and monthly objectives to achieve related to those relationships. The goals ranged from a simple “just checking in to see how things are going” email, to remembering customer’s birthdays with emails or phone calls, to more in-depth account reviews. Every time someone hit all of their objectives for the week, they picked a plastic green army man out of a large bucket filled with them and received a free lunch. Once all the army men were gone–– around 12 weeks later––we gave a large company wide prize. The prize was a company “booze cruise” celebration.
The theme was a success, and not just because we didn’t lose any clients. It turns out that the theme itself implicitly said so much about our company culture and it reinforced, on a weekly basis, our values to all the employees new and old alike. It said things like
1. Our customers are important to us no matter how big or small
2. Everyone in the company plays a role in keeping our customers
3. When faced with a big challenge, our company supports working together to solve it
4. We can have fun while we grow as long as we are keeping our customers
5. It’s OK to let loose after a job well done
6. There are no shortcuts to maintain good relationships with our customers
It also increases the pride of employees within the company for working for our company. None of their friend’s companies would approach their goals in such a playful manner!