Commitment is a scary word. It feels so final. But it is the bedrock to building trust. Trust is like a bank. There are deposits and withdrawals. When we honor our commitments, deposits into the “Trust-Bank” are made. If we miss a commitment, withdrawals are made. And if your account balance can’t cover the withdrawal? Relationships may come to a halt.
In today’s culture series – we explore Wholestack Solutions core philosophy of “Make a Commitment, Keep a Commitment” and how you can use this value in your own business to unleash your potential.
Reading reviews online is like the wild, wild west of the internet. You never really know what you’re going to get. There are too many pages of negative reviews. However, from time to time you read a positive review where a reviewer may say “did what it was supposed to.”
And the review score is likely high. That’s the bar today – doing what we’re supposed to do. Honoring our commitments.
We’ve become so focused on advanced analytics or chatbots or making sure our posts go viral, that we’ve lost the most basic ingredient to business success: honoring commitments. Doing what we promised we could do.
Many may argue that something like ‘make a commitment, keep a commitment’ is too basic in today’s complicated business world…and many would be wrong. We spend so much time, effort and money on building ‘brands’…convincing consumers and customers to trust us and so little resources on delivering on the promise.
In fact, according to American Customer Satisfaction Index, customer satisfaction fell to its’ lowest level at the end of 2022 than its seen in over a decade and a half. https://www.theacsi.org/the-acsi-difference/us-overall-customer-satisfaction/
This lack of satisfaction can be traced back to a feeling of being let down – of commitments not being made.
So how can your organization honor its’ commitments? The best starting point is internal commitment meeting. It happens across every organization across the world – we become distracted, too busy and miss a deadline internally. We lower the priority of serving our internal constituents because we convince ourselves that the external focus (i.e. customers) is more important. And while that may be somewhat true, it’s more about mindset and culture. Allowing commitments to be dropped, even if lower in priority or not impacting customers – begins to erode the mentality of honoring all commitments.
Wholestack Solutions leverages tools that help us keep commitments front and center – from ToDoIst to track tasks to our ITSM platform that helps us honor external commitments to customers. Having a tool – a robot friend, if you will – remind us of our commitments and keep us on track, is how we engrain the importance of it.
We also use tools like Lattice to let our teammates know when a missed commitment impacts our work. It’s not used from a punitive perspective, but to help others see outside of their bubble. Too often, we’re insulated from how our work impacts others – by using feedback loops, we can share with those whose work does impact our own so they can understand the importance of honoring commitments.
Using task trackers and feedback loops is a great way to honor commitments, internally and externally and help you create a culture of delivering on expectations.
