The term “compliance” gets a bad rap. Immediately the term suggests rules, regulations, inspections, audits and punitive outcomes for those outside of the rules. We immediately think of the financial industry or maybe the manufacturing sector and health and safety compliance. Rarely do we correlate compliance to customer satisfaction. This is something I do daily when I talk about Action Card.

Brand Standards

 As a software development company, Volano Solutions understands systems well and the importance of clarity and definition in the daily work of employees. Franchises, multi-location companies and organizations who have a well-defined model have staked and scaled their growth based on consistency and adherence to the fundamentals that made that system successful. In this regard, compliance to those tenets is necessary not just for health, safety or legal reasons but to delight customers and drive revenue. Whether these are brand standards or best practices, we have learned that there are a few key success traits that good business managers demonstrate in the world of standards consistency and performance. Below are a few common denominators.

1.)    Good standards are always directly related to the customer experience. Cleanliness, customer service and product quality are the core standards being reviewed

2.)    Standards are objective, measurable and reviewed freqently

3.)    Training of brand standards and communiation is ongoing

4.)    Owners measure compliance and can correlate it to performance

The core attribute is consistency. The company Questback  wrote a great piece to this point in regard to creating customers who love your brand and more importantly, will recommend it to others . They state that “providing a high quality, consistent service leads to good customer experience and increases the likelihood that your product will be recommended to others. Never, ever underestimate the power of consistency to generate loyalty and referral from your customers. Get this right and your satisfied promoters will be legion.”

 Compliance Reviews and Revenue

Everybody in business understands the power of customer referrals. We all generally get that customer advocacy stems from the emotional response triggered from your product and service; their experience with every aspect of your sales process. The bridge that needs to be made has to do with vision and tactics. If consistency leads to revenue, we must be mindful of what is occurring regularly. I consistently slice the golf ball when I tee off on the two tragic days of the year that I play. So consistency is a negative here. Therefore before you manage adherence to your standards, you better make sure they are the right standards. What is your organization’s vision for delighting customers? What standards, if put in place and followed, will directly relate to your customer’s level of satisfaction with every part of the buying process? This is the vision. Once you have that, a system needs to be put in place to ensure that there us absolute clarity and buy-in that vision and reviews are being done consistently to ensure they are being followed.