Some companies pay thousands of dollars to retain marketing consulting firms to assist with development of a mission statement. In our case, our mission statement had been in place for years; but had become more of a marketing slogan than our company's abiding ideology. For that reason, a member of our Senior Team recommended that we revisit our mission statement during a recent all company management meeting. The three hours we spent discussing our mission statement proved to be very valuable.
A mission statement is a company's reason for being that must be internalized by all employees as a working ideology to be effective. In some ways, a mission statement should be thought of as the company's religion. And, the most effective, impactful mission statements should be simple and stated in as few words as possible to be easily memorable. After considerable discussion, we arrived at a new mission statement. Since we provide global relocation and immigration services, as well as, mortgage and home care services within the United States, we needed a mission statement that could apply to all of our businesses. After considering the nuances of lots of words, we arrived at "We are in business to provide an extraordinary customer experience, one family at a time." This simple statement says it all.
This use of the word "extraordinary" has allowed for the marketing slogan when "great service is not good enough". However, using the word "extraordinary" in our mission statement has placed a new burden our company. Once we put on these glasses, through which we must see not only our Operations, but all functions in our company, all of a sudden every thing we do is measured by the word "extraordinary", which is tough.
Recently, I charged our senior management team with achieving 100% client retention and 95% or better outstanding customer service ratings. To get there, everyone from our office Receptionists to the President and CEO of our holding company, Me, must perform in an "extraordinary" way related to both internal and external interactions. And, we must make sure that those companies in our supply chain fully understand our service expectations.
At a recent supplier conference, I made it very clear that we were not interested in good or great service; but rather extraordinary service. During the meeting, I was able to point to posters in all of our meeting rooms and throughout our offices that speak to our mission statement as a daily reminder of our reason for being. Developing a mission statement is the easy part. Living a mission statement is hard work; but worth the effort to retain existing clients and sign new ones.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment