It’s not your product. It’s your team.

When building customer loyalty, retention, and revenue, it’s not your CRM, product, or branding that makes the difference. The real difference lies in your team and the people behind it.

The amount of “skin in the game” they have either makes or breaks your business.

The Power of People:

Throughout my career, I’ve realised the power of a strong team over fancy technological additions or branding. If you want to achieve results and make an impact, it all comes down to the people who make it happen.

Investing in Talent:

While you can train your team to improve their skills, they must have the desire to grow. Enrolling them in courses, providing them with books, and conducting quizzes can only go so far if they need more motivation to improve. Without the right mindset, they will coast and require constant supervision and guidance.

The Role of Leadership:

Having a team of high performers is fantastic, but it can lead to other issues without effective leadership. Boredom, distractions, and eventually rebellion or resignation can arise if team members need to be properly engaged. They need to be busy and have clear guidance on what is expected of them. Again, it would help if you had the right people — skin in the game.

Identifying the Right Fit and if you currently have the right people:

1. Accountability: Do they meet their deadlines consistently? A small margin of error is acceptable, but always missing deadlines means they need to care more about the job.
2. Proactivity: Do they require constant reminders to complete tasks that should be done independently? Quarterly reports, objective setting, updating CRMs, and other tasks should be completed without continuous prompts.
3. Timeliness: Are they frequently late with their work without making an effort to communicate or request extensions? Being consistently late signals a lack of commitment to deadlines.
4. Excuses: When confronted about the quality or timeliness of their work, do they provide weak reasons that can easily be dismissed? Genuine accountability involves taking responsibility without making feeble justifications.

Finding Good Talent:

There are two effective approaches to finding good talent:

1. Willingness to Learn: Look for individuals who strongly desire to learn and improve on the job. They should show progress quarter after quarter in all aspects of their work.
2. High Performers: Alternatively, you can hire individuals with proven high-performance record in their previous roles.

The hard thing about hard things:

The book by Ben Horowitz sums up people very well and concludes that when the business changes, it needs a hero. A lot of people resist change instead of embracing it. In a lot of cases, you need to let people go in order to grow.

By focusing on building a team of dedicated individuals and providing strong leadership, you can create a customer service department that drives customer loyalty and retention.