Your Decisions Reveal Who You Are, and What You Value

When you make a decision, it results in an action. And the accumulation of those decisions and actions become how people describe you and think of you. It becomes your “story.”

• What is the story that the collective decisions of your organization are telling your customers, employees, and the marketplace?
• What is important to you?
• Are your decisions reflecting what you intended and what your company stands for?

Getting customers to love you begins with how you consider the people impacted by your decisions.

You tell customers every day how much you honor them by the way you direct decisions in one direction or another. And that’s what they play back to the masses. That’s what shows up on the Internet.

The section Driving Culture Change in Chief Customer Officer 2.0 provides profiled decisions made by beloved companies of every size and across many industries who earned the right to their customers’ stories. They are called beloved companies because of the emotional attachment customers have to them.

Here are a few recent profiles:

What Defines Your Experience? Are You Remembered for Being There? Do You Accept Accountability When Things Go Wrong? Is Your Trusting Cup Half Full or Half Empty?

Beloved companies are acutely aware that their experience impacts how customers feel and respond. They take the time to make purposeful decisions about the contacts with customers. Beloved companies actively decide to connect who they are as individuals with the decisions they make in how to run their business.

Common to beloved companies is the concentration, angst, and passion that they put into decision-making. Suspending their fear that the dollars and cents won’t come swiftly enough, beloved companies decide to run their businesses with what each of us learned as kids – the Golden Rule.

The decisions we make in our business lives measure the depth of our humanity – our ability to apply that simple Golden Rule.

• How we choose to correct something that goes wrong.
• How steadfast we are in delivering the goods and ensuring quality.
• How we give employees what they need to enable them do the right thing for customers.

All these decisions expose what a company values. And the actions that tumble from these decisions expose the kind of people we are.

Think about how you experience companies throughout your life as both customer and employee.

• Why do you feel so connected to some and distanced from others?
• How does your feeling about a company relate to your natural desire to follow the Golden Rule?
• When a company makes genuine attempts to do the right thing, does this draw you to them?