2. Treat your people well.

Customer service excellence begins with employee service excellence. If you treat your people well, you stand a better chance at hiring and retaining top talent and nurturing a healthy and positive work environment. Prioritize your employees from the top down and across every department.

To treat your people well, I recommend that you focus on these practices.

• Give them autonomy. People need the opportunity to dictate their own professional destiny—whether to succeed, underperform or fail. Autonomy breeds perceived value and meaning for employees.

• Reinforce a sense of purpose. Emphasize the importance of your team’s work and contributions by tying them to the qualitative and quantitative outcomes of customers.

• Hold them accountable. Clearly establish responsibilities and hold your people accountable for how they perform against expectations. Again, this creates a sense of meaning and purpose for your team.

3. Strive for continuous improvement, but take time to celebrate wins.

Complacency is the erosion of success, while continuous improvement is the sustenance of sustainable growth. Combat the former by setting more aspirational goals and pushing for improvements where you can find them. Yet, also give your team a reason to stay motivated by inviting them to celebrate wins along the way.

To balance continuous improvement and team appreciation, consider the following practices.

• Leverage formal meetings. Use monthly or quarterly business meetings as opportunities to set new objectives and reflect on past performance. Ground objectives in what can be accomplished in a given quarter and reflect on past performance using both qualitative and quantitative results.

• Embrace the power of intermittent, informal feedback. Create feedback loops for your team in casual conversations and during formal meetups. Recognize qualitative and quantitative results. Use these opportunities to encourage the importance of staying committed to your current objectives. This helps reinforce the importance of performance and tells employees they matter.

Put your customers and employees first.

Customers are the lifeblood of your business. But so are your employees. Your business depends on a harmonious connection between both groups. Contrary to past debates or the current practices of some, doing right by your customers can also achieve the same for your employees and vice versa.

Still, creating shared value between both stakeholders requires an intentional approach—one that centers on the three factors examined in this article. If you adopt these tenets, I believe that you improve your chances of boosting the engagement and satisfaction of your customers and your employees.

Success is not a zero-sum game or the product of a scarcity mindset. Quite the opposite. Success is a question of abundance and whether you can provide it to the two sets of stakeholders who ultimately matter.