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Preserving the Value You Create
AS HARD AS WE WORK IN THE PERFORMING ARTS to create value for our audiences and communities, do we really understand how fragile value is?
As tough and time-consuming as value is to create, it isn’t durable. When it comes to destroying value, an apathetic or careless employee is as dangerous as is a rude one - especially in an environment where consumers are so attuned to service quality.
Batteries of research over the last two decades all describe North American arts audiences using the same descriptive dimensions: affluent, well-educated, discerning, self-actualizing, and busy. No matter where one goes, these descriptors seem to apply.
As of late, however, two new behavioral traits are showing up: impatient and intolerant. Having repeatedly been promised excellent customer service and having experienced it in more than a few contexts - Disneyworld, upscale hotels and spas, Nordstrom, Apple, and Pottery Barn - consumers are intolerant of experiences and service levels that don’t meet their standards.
Furthermore, we don’t set the standards. Standards are set by the best service providers in society.
There’s a strategic issue here. Our audiences have Ritz-Carlton standards while most arts organizations are staffed like the local mom-and-pop motel. As a sector, we haven’t kept up. What’s worse, because we’ve bought into our own rhetoric about how important and indispensable the arts are to society, we believe that people will endure incompetent, apathetic, or bad service just to get their “arts fix.�
Well, it ain’t necessarily so. I refer you to an earlier blog that is scary in its implications: When Numbers Lie
So what do we do about it?
First, we would benefit by developing human resource strategies that evaluate and establish critical performance competencies based on a position’s potential to destroy value, not just the potential to create value. While enterprises are at risk by not creating value, they experience considerably greater risk and revenue loss from value destruction.
Who are those people that are best-positioned to destroy value? Those employees who provide direct customer service.
Second, when we consider how expensive it is to acquire audiences (estimated at a $10 to $1, acquire-to-maintain ratio), our compensation strategies should reflect value creation & destruction potentials.
A customer service employee’s EQ (emotional intelligence quotient) is likely much more valuable to our organization than is their IQ. Handling customers well is difficult work.
How often do we take effective customer service for granted? Reflecting a cultural bias that “anyone can be nice,� we too often hire based on whether we like a person or not, and whether we believe they will “be nice� to customers – a naïve and unsophisticated performance metric if ever there was one. “Being nice� is lazy language that describes a much more complex set of skills and outcomes that are necessary to keep valuable customers coming back.
There is a fundamental small-c, cultural bias here. Employment classification and compensation structures are built around higher education attainment levels that sometimes have very little to do with our actual organizational goals and objectives.
Being able to analyze a problem after the fact - employing sophisticated quantitative methodologies and expensive technological tools - is not nearly as valuable to an organization as is an employee’s competency to avoid the value-destruction problem in the first place.
If we want to keep those well-educated, affluent audiences for which we have invested dearly, we would be well-advised to build people and organizations that preserve and nourish value. Value is too easily destroyed to take any other tack.
Posted on April 17, 2006 06:29 PM | Permalink
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Comments
This is so important that it needs to be repeated every day for a long time. Assuming that repetition is the greater teacher.