Connecting your people to the customer they never meet

I recently read a piece from gapingvoid that I haven't stopped thinking about.

It talks about the US Marines and something called the "kill chain," the step-by-step sequence of finding a target, tracking it, deciding, acting and debriefing. Every link depends on the one before it. But the article's real point is that the process is the easy part. The hard part is keeping everyone motivated, including the people nowhere near the action. The person filling in forms. The person in the warehouse. The person ordering staplers.

Their answer is the "meaning chain." You link even the most ordinary job to the bigger picture, so everyone knows why their bit matters. It's why the Marines insist that every Marine is a rifleman, whatever their role.

Swap the battlefield for a business and you've got a problem I see in almost every organisation I work with.

The frontline gets meaning for free

The people who deal with your customers see the difference they make every day. They get the thank you, the smile, the relief on someone's face.

The people behind them don't. Accounts, payroll, IT, compliance, admin. They do work that matters just as much, but they rarely see who it lands on. Over time, the customer becomes a number, a ticket, an invoice. And when the customer is an abstraction, care slowly drains out of the work. Not because people are lazy, but because nobody ever showed them who's on the other end.

The good news is the research says this is fixable, and often cheaply.

Five minutes with one real person

Adam Grant, the organisational psychologist, studied a university call centre where staff rang alumni asking for donations. It's grinding work. One caller had a sign on his wall joking that doing a good job there was like wetting your pants in a dark suit: you get a warm feeling, but no one else notices.

Grant brought in a student whose scholarship had been funded by their calls. He spoke for about five minutes about how it changed his life and thanked them. A month later, the callers were spending 142% more time on the phone and raising 171% more money. Same script, same pay.

Here's the bit leaders need to hear. In a later study, one group met the student, and another group heard a manager describe a student who'd benefited. Only the group who met the student improved. A secondhand story from the boss didn't cut it.

And the kicker? The organisation already had a database full of thank-you letters from scholarship students. Nobody had thought to share them with the callers.

A letter every Christmas

At Medtronic, a heart patient named Ron Brown wrote to co-founder Earl Bakken to say thank you for the pacemaker that saved his life. Bakken read it out to staff at the 1977 holiday gathering. Brown kept writing every Christmas, and by 2014 his 38th letter was updating employees on his 12 grandchildren.

Think about what that does for the engineer writing code or the person on the production line. Former CEO Bill George made the point that if there's a software glitch in a defibrillator, someone could die. Put like that, the work stops being a task and becomes personal.

A gold key on the factory floor

John Deere invites farmers who are buying a tractor to visit the factory with their families. The assembly line workers meet them, hand over a gold key, and watch them start their tractor for the first time. Those workers don't just build tractors anymore. They build Dave's tractor.

It doesn't even need to be the customer

This is the one I love most for back office teams. In another study, a manager from a different department simply visited a call centre to thank the staff for how their work helped his team. Effort went up 51% the following week.

So your frontline can be the "customer" your back office never hears from. A support worker, salesperson or site manager saying "because you sorted that out, this happened" is powerful.

Even a photo works. When radiologists, who rarely meet patients, saw a photo of the person whose scan they were reading, they wrote more thorough reports and picked up more incidental findings.

What this looks like in your organisation

Picture Sarah in accounts. A billing error goes out and a long-time customer gets chased for money they've already paid. To Sarah, it's a reconciliation issue to fix on Monday. To the customer, it's the moment they start wondering if you actually value them.

Now picture Sarah having met that customer at your end-of-year event, or having heard the account manager talk about how much that relationship means. Same Sarah, same system. She picks up the phone that afternoon.

That's the whole idea. You're not asking people to care more. You're showing them who they're already caring for.

Four things you can do this month

1. Trace one real story backwards. Pick a moment where you made a real difference for a customer. Walk it back through every role that made it possible, and name them. Payroll paid the person who showed up. IT kept the system running. Finance got the contract over the line.
2. Bring the customer in. Invite a customer to your next all-hands, even for ten minutes. Or film them. Or read their letter out loud. Then check your inbox, your surveys and your reviews, because you probably have stories sitting there already.
3. Get the frontline to say thank you. Make it a habit in your meeting rhythm. One example a week of how a back office team made a frontline win possible.
4. Give every team one number the customer feels. Not just internal measures. Time to resolve an invoice query. Days to onboard a new client. Something that connects their work to a real person's experience.

One question to sit with

If I walked into your back office tomorrow and asked someone, "Who do you work for?", what would they say?

If the answer is "my manager," you've got some work to do. If it's a person, a customer, a family, a business they can picture, you're well on your way.

Thanks again to the team at gapingvoid for the spark. If you're into culture, purpose and the human side of leadership, their newsletter is one of the few I read every time. I'd highly recommend subscribing at gapingvoid.com.

Sources

• gapingvoid, gapingvoid culture design newsletter
• Adam M. Grant, How Customers Can Rally Your Troops, Harvard Business Review (June 2011)
• KARE 11, Heart patient's annual thank-you letter becomes Medtronic tradition (December 2014)
• Health Imaging, Patient photos spur radiologist empathy and eye for detail (2008)