Shopper Experience: How Top Customer Service Cultures Build And Sustain Positive Cultural Norms

In a superior customer service culture, it’s understood that serving customers positively and proactively is the default, the expected behavior. These are cultures in which giving great customer service is “simply the way we do things around here.”

Read more: Shopper Experience: 4 fixes for the disconnect between marketing and the customer experience.

One of the forces that sustains this cultural norm is what I call positive peer pressure, a term I’ve borrowed from Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning author Tina Rosenberg. Generally, of course, we think of peer pressure as being negative. Consider smoking: The way I imagine it, there was only one teenager in the history of teenagers who independently figured out how to cultivate tobacco, cure the leaf, roll it into a cylinder, light it on fire, and repeat the process enough times to get addicted.  The rest of the world’s teens then learned from that one teen, or from each other.

But peer pressure can also be a force for good. Think of what it feels like to walk into a great, customer-focused company.  Your immediate impression is that every employee in the store is here to help achieve a “yes” for you. An employee from one of these great companies (who spoke to me without attribution) credits the “yes” mentality to both the intrinsic positive nature of the people her company hires and the positive peer pressure she feels all around that keeps everyone doing their positive best:

I feel I have this ‘yes attitude’ within me, and they knew that when they hired me. But also, all around me, my colleagues are here demonstrating this attitude as well–and have been, for the most part, since I started working here. It really rubs off on me when I’m slipping a bit, and I hope my attitude does the same to lift others here up as well.

How do you develop the positive peer pressure that can support a default of positivity within your company’s customer service culture? One of the keys is in the quote, above: Strive to hire for this “yes attitude.” Then,reward and support this attitude wherever possible, by talking about the importance of exceptional customer service every day, starting from the first moments of orientation (onboarding); and by catching your employees doing something right for a customer and celebrating that when it happens. After that, this cultural norm should take off on its own–and, through the force of positive peer pressure,  become self-reinforcing.