Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” Note the inclusion of the adjective “foolish” and the absence of business owners in the quote. There is nothing foolish about strategic consistency across your business.
Consistency of the non-foolish variety doesn’t exclude innovation and flexibility. Such consistency not only accommodates but encourages both and is characteristic of successful companies. It keeps your business grounded while allowing the adaptation needed to grow and flourish.
Consistency in your business makes it infinitely easier for all those things that need to happen every day to happen. With it, redundancies and omissions don’t interfere with operations. Everyone working for the company and doing business with it are on the same page.
In a rapidly changing world, consistency is all about steadfastness and trust. If those are what you aim for in your business, here are three ways you can achieve greater consistency.
1. Create Clear and Consistent Content
Content and messaging drive successful 21st-century companies. The sheer volume of platforms you use to engage with your employees, vendors, customers, and clients can prove unwieldy. If you’re putting conflicting information out there, people will notice.
There’s a longstanding marketing practice that says you need to repeat your phone number three times in a broadcast ad. It’s the repetition of that consistent information that makes the number memorable. Use a different number in a different ad, and listeners will notice — worse still, they’ll be confused.
The same is true with the content you put out there over the years on multiple platforms. Of course, your content is far more involved than a phone number. So you may be spending a tremendous amount of time and resources trying to avoid sending mixed messages.
Instead of poring over PDFs to cut and paste consistent paragraphs, employ a component content management system. With a CCMS, you establish governing components, so every version of content comes from a single source. Content management occurs at the component level, whether that’s a word, a phrase, a graphic, photo, or video.
The best way to ensure your business isn’t sending any mixed signals is to use a CCMS for both internal and external communications. Take the human cutting and pasting and subsequent double-checking out of the equation. The granular approach adds up to consistency every time.
2. Establish Consistent Policies and Procedures
Even the smallest companies need to establish policies and procedures. Why can’t you wing it? Because standard procedures guide the day-to-day operations of your business, and steadfast guidance is key to success.
Policies and procedures are critical to ensuring compliance with laws, rules, and regulations. They streamline operations by eliminating the need to make decisions about the same issues every day. You make them, educate your employees about them, and only address exceptions when necessary.
While this may sound like Business 101, it’s not that easy. Policies and procedures are created at different times by different people. That reality sets up the potential for conflicts among them.
If you haven’t reviewed your policies and procedures collectively, you need to. Make sure they are not only consistent with one another but consistent with your company’s values and culture. Use a CCMS to help you identify where information among them conflicts and make them consistent.
Pandemic-driven upheaval of the traditional workplace and employee priorities had many companies adjusting policies on the fly. It’s high time to review yours to make sure they’re all in sync with current realities.
3. Design a Consistent Customer Experience
Customer trust is built on several factors, such as delivering what you promise and making good when you don’t. At the end of the day, customers want to know what to expect. If you don’t meet those expectations, they won’t come back.
You might call it the customer experience version of the McDonald’s strategy. At any Golden Arches across the country, a Big Mac tastes exactly the same. Your business should, at least in CX terms, strive for the same consistency.
Let’s say you buy a widget from a company that promises it will solve a problem you have, and it does. The sales process is smooth and transparent, and the company follows up after the sale to make sure you’re satisfied. You buy another widget from the company that’s defective, and this time, it’s crickets when you try to complain. This inconsistency will likely discourage you from attempting a third purchase.
Your company’s CX should accommodate measures for when customers are delighted and when they aren’t. The goal should be that at the conclusion of a transaction, every customer is satisfied with you. That requires consistency across marketing channels, in sales and fulfillment, in the training of customer service employees, and in oversight of CX.
Customers who know they will receive consistently high-quality service before, during, and after the sale will keep coming back. That includes those occasions when they buy a lemon — it’s your efforts to correct the problem that will make the difference. Your CX design needs to maintain consistency even when an individual customer’s issues are unique.
Strategic Consistency Isn’t Hogwash
The value of building consistency across your content, policies and procedures, and customer experience is obvious. The reward for making that a goal is employee and customer trust, loyalty, and engagement. All of that will translate to your bottom line.
Even Emerson would admit there’s nothing foolish about anchoring your business strategy in consistency.