I held a series of interview with some of today’s most accomplished Founder-CEOs who are redefining the concept of customer excellence for the future.

They better meet the expectations of the new generations, who react far more quickly to how they’re treated. With them, one wrong move creates a “paper cut” that can forever highlight your mistakes — across social media. But maintaining customer excellence starts with the environment and culture the leaders create for their people. 

These leaders all have winning approaches to stategic customer relations – which show that customer success is about far more than just the customer. Here are their four key strategies: 

Happy Employees Make Happy Customers

Kingston Technology is the world’s largest independent manufacturer of memory products with 3,000-plus employees worldwide. It’s been listed on Fortune’s “Best Companies to Work for in America.” Founders John Tu and David Sun built a culture of respect, loyalty, flexibility, and integrity, including a substantial investment in employees: the belief is that if they take care of their people, their people will look after others inside and outside the organization. “The business will follow,” Tu said. 

Be a Rebel and an Evangelist

Big River Steels sees itself as a tech company that happens to make steel, a mindset forged by the founding CEO John Correnti that carries through today with CEO Dave Stickler. According to Mark Bula, the former CCO, Big River’s culture begins with people at the top who truly believe in empowering its workforce and thinking beyond the status quo. The company defines itself as  “reimagining what it means to be a steel company in the global marketplace.” Bula believes leaders need to create an environment in which workers feel they can grow as individuals as well. “The way to get people excited about it was to get them to understand, we’re going to do something completely different,” he said. The leadership eats with employees, interacts with them daily, and drives the message that they are not making a commodity grade of steel, and their employees are not a commodity grade of employer either. “You’re here because we need people to be rebels, because we need people to create a rebel brand.” 

Give Your Players What It Takes to Be Highly Productive

Jerry Colangelo, former owner of the Phoenix Suns is a repeat “Sportsman of the Year” and influential NBA coach who has done it all. Raised in the humble “lunch box community” of South Chicago he saw college and pro sports as a place to level the playing field. Unafraid to fail and unintimidated by competitors, he built game strategies on calculated risk. He created the Phoenix Suns as a family-based culture of relationships, trust, and loyalty, and knew that great players would inspire far better loyalty from the fans who are the team’s community. Following a poor start to an Arizona Diamondbacks’ season, he quickly improved the team’s talent, a move that showed his respect for the team’s community. He made a series of high-prestige appointments and accountabilities, built cultures where players would cherish the team or country they represented, and repeatedly focused on hiring the right people to make winning teams. Money was never the issue when recruiting, but his players and staff understood he expected their total commitment to teamwork. 

Provide Customers with “Fanatical Support”

Morris Miller, co-founder of Rackspace and CEO of Xenex Disinfection Systems, builds unorthodox customer-centric organizations. At Rackspace, he recruited people who could deliver fanatical customer support, and reconfigured organizational silos to put a member of each functional area on customer serving teams. The result: more integrated and efficient service that shortened the distance between Rackspace and customers. At Xenex, he put machines and employees in locations until they were convinced of the product’s life-saving potential — and could bring the Xenex skillset and expertise into hospitals with hard-to-move professional forces. His problem was to solve their problems — turning Xenex experts into co-workers on location. Despite the growing dominance of technology today, he bets future business success will hinge on who can provide human support. 

Founder-inspired customer service strategies will secure customer loyalty far beyond 2019. In the cases of all the organizations I studied and the leaders I interviewed, the leaders’ commitment to employees — in terms of behavior and investment — is what drove business success. That success continues to reflect the values of the founders. Change those leadership behaviors, and you risk future customer losses. But as these leaders noted, if you help a customer succeed as much as you would for yourself, you will always win. 

Despite all the focus on engagement tools to better motivate employees, evidence shows they fail to spark a real sense of belonging. Although 87 percent of organizations listed engagement as a top priority in a recent study, a mere 15 percent of employees report actually feeling engaged in the workplace.

For employees to perform at their highest levels and be dedicated to the collective success of the organization, they need to love where they work. They need to feel an Emotional Connection (EC): a motivating sense of satisfaction and intellectual alignment that can only come from feeling appreciated and part of a shared and worthy purpose.

When employees see how their work positively affects organizational outcomes, and that it matters to their managers, colleagues, and the wider world, that’s an emotional connection. It requires something deeper and longer-lasting than financial incentives. Increasing salaries, offering huge bonuses and other perk-based plans will not create legitimate, long-term buy-in from employees, despite the cost. Neither do engagement efforts, as they are often executed by HR departments, which keeps leadership in the dark and detached from the process and from employees. Employees want the opposite: they want to feel aligned, and connected, with leaders.

When employees feel supported by leaders and able to be themselves, and profoundly connect to each other, it shifts their perception of their workplace to being “In Great Company.” It’s a positive dynamic: you’re in a place you love, you want to give more of yourself, and you choose to add value. As a result, you are more willing and able to achieve your business goals.

Not only is the state of emotional connectedness possible, it’s instrumental to organizational success. “Emotional connectedness undoubtedly inspires discretionary effort and passion from our employees and our customers,” says Bob Maresca, CEO of Bose Corporation. Dozens of other CEOs, including Hubert Joly, Chairman, and CEO of Best Buy, concur.

Leaders need to tend to five critical elements to spark emotional connection and improve workplace engagement and productivity. These elements are ubiquitous, implementation-focused, and together create a great workplace in which everyone is inspired to perform at their peak:

1. Respect: Feeling genuinely respected is the prime reason people love their work and are happy to be there. The sense of emotional connectedness is far deeper in environments where respect is established as a type of social currency and exchanged reciprocally. Making respect a part of the organization’s ethos and talent management processes, as Starbucks and Wegman’s have—is essential to applying this dimension. Respect is the element that catalyzes all the others to drive peak performance, the match that sparks the flame.

2. Alignment of values: Employees thrive in organizations that place emphasis on higher-order qualities such as honesty, integrity, and resonance with personal beliefs. The emotional connection is established when leaders and peers all embrace common values, and everyone holds each other equally accountable. Granular practices may be as simple as doing what you say you are going to do, or speaking a truth instead of avoiding it. More conceptually complex methods include living the values and ethics the company espouses, such as what happens in Patagonia and Johnson & Johnson.

3. Positive future: Employees thrive in progress-focused cultures that foster innovation and passion. Since positivity is a cultural contagion, emotional connectedness is achieved when individuals use it in a unified way to move forward together to achieve results. Although positivity may seem like a by-product of emotional connectedness, it’s also a powerful catalyst for creating an emotionally connected culture — as happens in WD-40 or Big River Steel.

4. Systemic collaboration: Employees feel part of a great company when true and functional collaboration becomes a part of the inner workings of the organization and its decision-making processes. Working in small teams, they co-create results using open communication channels, where information and advice for being better in the future are shared freely and frequently. Companies such as KeyBank and Atlassian observe several specific practices to co-create a sustained connection that drives results.

5. Killer achievement: Killer achievement delivers a combination of financial and emotional upside that amplifies the effect for everyone. Employees need to be empowered to focus on the customers and critical goals, with extraneous minutia, eliminated. Objectives should be simply stated, with the system removing competing interests that block the path to success. This entails identifying and measuring the elements most important to the organization, and allowing easy options for leadership, organizational development, and executive coaching. Companies like Best Buy and Netflix ensure their people can create killer outcomes, keeping the organizations relevant, strong, and innovative.

It takes leadership buy-in to establish these five elements, that makes aligned values, collaboration, co-creation, respect, and a focus on achievement all intrinsic parts of the organization. Frequent measurements should be made to gauge the changes happening in the organization. Establish a consistent pattern of follow-up, and make sure everyone in the company stays involved. When this dynamic is set into motion in a workplace, everyone is aligned — and willing to do whatever it takes to preserve and grow the business together. In that scenario, everyone wins.