Bridging the Gap Between Mission Passion and Customer Service

I recently discussed with a senior executive in the financial services sector how, in some organizations, employees might be hugely committed to the mission of the enterprise, without this somehow translating into a powerful customer service ethos.

I occasionally meet people who work at companies like Virgin Atlantic, Nike or many of the luxury retail brands and get the sense that they are really passionate about what the company stands for and offers. Designers at Tiffany will tell you how excited they get when they see people wearing their jewelry in the street, Nike employees surely bleed the swoosh logo if you cut them open (not recommended, by the way). It is these people whose level of engagement in what they are doing remind me of the power of having a 'vocation'. Strangely though, this 'mission passion' doesn't always translate into a passion for the customer (maybe customers are just too fickle for even the most passionate soul!).

As I reflect on this, I wonder if this is merely an extension of the age old problem of reality not living up to the ideas: people as different as Gandhi, President Clinton and Rush Limbaugh have all shown us the difficulties of matching ideas about how society should operate with their own personal lives; the idea of Webvan (remember that one?) seemed an immensely attractive idea to many, but completely failed in practice; the JP Morgan folk who dreamed up credit derivatives didn't seem to anticipate the ways in which they would be used once their ideas started to spread.

In this conversation, I saw a threefold problem for the executive:
1.How do you translate passion for mission into world beating customer service, as Nordstrom has been famed for over the years or these other companies nominated by Business Week
2. If you haven't got either end of it right (neither mission passion, nor service), where do you start to make the change
3. Who can you look to in the Financial Services Industry as an exemplar?

To state the obvious, the number of variables at play here mean that the questions are much easier to pose than the answers to find. As it is not in my nature to be defeatist, I would suggest the following possibilities:
1. Very few big ideas are truly astounding enough to do more than provide passing excitement, so building from the grass roots up (yes, there may be something to learn from politicians here) is a more likely route to establish and sustain shifts in values than from going top down
2. Cross pollination between industries may provide some of the best ideas that would help a company to break free of the accepted rules of the game within it's own sector (put Nike employees or Tiffany designers in a room with some investment bankers and lock the door)
3. While the Financial Services industry may not have a great reputation at the moment, there are some examples of banks who have achieved impressive levels of customer service (look again at that Business Week list).

Establishing consistency between ideas, values and behaviors seems like a good place to start. Match the way leaders talk to how they act, link the mission to the HR systems and business processes and design products that you would be proud of. Then, be consistent enough in your approach that people, internally and externally, can see that your intentions are serious. Based on what some impressive companies are achieving, this combination seems likely to take you a long way towards bridging that gap between mission passion and great customer service.