Customer Culture: How FedEx® and Other Great Companies Put the Customer First Every Day

Introduction

Culture drives performance in an organization. Culture is everything. As one Chief Executive Officer (CEO) recently put it: “Get the culture right, and your people will do what is necessary to serve their customers and make owners piles of money.” Put an average human being in an above-average culture, and the person will change behaviors to adapt to the new culture. Change the culture in an existing company, and the people will change with it.

An organizational culture is a system. That system can drive people to high performance directed toward profitable customer loyalty, or it can drive apathy, internally directed, or any number of destructive “customer cancerous” activities.

We are creatures of habit. Action and reaction are programmed ...