As consumers, we know that news of bad customer service reaches more than twice as many ears as praise for a good service experience. There are many online avenues for your clients to share their experience with the world – good or bad – from Yelp to Youtube – and your future potential customers pay attention.
Ongoing research by organizations like Gallup or Great Place to Work show that one of the biggest impacts a company can have on customer experience actually starts with their employee experience. In fact, top employers perform up to three times better than their counterparts. Companies with an average of 9.3 engaged employees for every 1 actively disengaged employee in 2010 – 2011 experienced 147% higher earnings per share when compared with their competition in 2011-2012. In contrast, companies with an average of 2.6 engaged employees for every 1 actively disengaged employee experienced 2% lower earnings per share when compared with their competition during that same time period.
Based on the evidence, organizations that partner with their employees help to create a wonderful customer experience. Here are 4 things your organization can do to impact your value chain:
1. Ask employees for feedback – frequently
Everyone in the organization from the front line to back office support can contribute to your customer service. Experience is an ongoing, ever-changing thing – so it’s important to check in with your people frequently. Find out how they feel about their employee experience and where they see success and where they see room for improvement. Creating a great culture for your employees makes each person into a Brand Ambassador for your company.
2. Provide opportunities for innovation
You’ve asked for feedback – now what will you do with it? Are there channels for employees in every position to suggest improvements? When you partner with your employees and encourage suggestions on how customer experience can be better, you’re empowering your people. This will help build the feeling that all employees have a ‘duty of care’ towards your customers. Provide avenues for your customers to provide feedback. Have a clear process for requesting, accepting, and escalating customer suggestions – and make sure that all your employees know this process by heart. It signals to your people – who signal to your customers – that their input is valued.
3. Know your NPS
The saying goes – what gets measured, gets improved. Your Net Promoter Score is a great loyalty metric to find out what percentage of your customers would recommend you to friends and family. In business, a referral is the highest praise. Share
This is a metric that should be shared with all your employees. It’s not something that should be kept in marketing and discussed only at the executive level. Everyone contributes to this measurement, so keep it top of everyone’s mind. Celebrate with your people if you receive high marks. Work with your employees to make an action plan if it is low.
4. Define what the “ideal customer experience” looks like
Knowing what product or service your company provides is really only on half of this pie. Painting a picture of what a great customer experience with your organization looks like will help your employees make decisions around how they can best achieve that ideal. Partner with your employees and your customers to define just what that experience should be.
That experience should be aligned with your company’s values and your overall mission and vision. Keep your brands in mind, and determine how you can provide a customer experience that matches your corporate and employer brands. The more closely your customer experience matches your employer brand, the easier it is for every employee to be proud to see themselves as extensions of that brand. It needs to be authentic and genuine.
Highly engaged employees feel a sense of ownership in an organization. It becomes a more personal goal to provide their customers with a high level of service. This link in the value chain creates more engaged customers. Engaged customers are happy customers. Happy customers are good for business.