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Customer experience continues to be a consistent mainstay atop the C-suite agenda year in and year out and billions of dollars pour into the CX management market each year from corporate budgets. The positive correlation between a better customer experience and value creation for the organization is undeniable. However, a curious theme has emerged recently, customer experience has come full circle and what was old is once again new.
I try to attend a few CX conferences per year to expand my network and stay abreast of the most recent technology trends in a rapidly developing field. Historically, these conferences focus on the latest technology advancements: A.I., predictive analytics, big data, automation, sentiment analysis, CRM software, etc. However, as of late, the dominant theme of these conferences has not been on the latest technology advancement but rather on teammate engagement, specifically the level of company buy-in of the front-line workers interacting with the customers. The thesis is simple: the more engaged and passionate your front-line workers are with your organization’s goals, the better the customer experience scores. Speaker after speaker, this continued to emerge as the primary theme, with empirical evidence to support the correlation. I must admit that it’s a bit amusing. We have seen a massive digital transformation over the last 10-15 years in the CX space, moving us from an analog to a digital world only to come full circle back to our simple beginnings. The most effective way to improve the experience of your customers is to drive greater engagement and well-being of the teammate group that interacts with them on a daily basis. Now this isn’t to say that the CX digital revolution has not been successful. It most certainly has. Many companies, in a rush to transform their CX programs with the latest technological advancement, have lost sight of the importance of the human element.
According to a recent Gallup Study, U.S. businesses lose an estimated $1 trillion dollars per year due to voluntary attrition. Furthermore, the cost of replacing an individual employee is 0.5-2x their salary. These are staggering figures. However, attrition is also extremely disruptive to the relationship between the company and the customer. Your customers like consistency and intimacy with whom they deal with; they like a high level of competency and proficiency in their dealings, and they want to feel a sense of trust. Turnover disrupts all of this and makes consistently high levels of customer experience nearly impossible to achieve. Companies with formal teammate engagement programs reported substantially lower annual attrition and higher levels of customer satisfaction.
“Clients do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients.” – Richard Branson.
Employees that are not engaged and bought into the company mission will do the bare minimum. This means that when they are interacting with customers, they will bring low energy with them, and customers will take notice. This can create a time-intensive culture of micromanagement of an under-engaged workforce. Front-line workers are the face of your organization. Take care of them and they will take care of your customers without management intervention. Neglect them and not only will your customer base feel the pain, but so will your organization's bottom line.
As I stated in one of my previous articles, ‘Transforming the Customer Experience in a B2B environment – Phase 1: Discovery and Assessment’, the first step in building a teammate engagement program is to gain a baseline of employee perceptions. This can be achieved through a variety of sources, including focus groups, internal surveys, historical exit interviews, 3rd party assessments, and employer review sites. Regardless of which sources are used, ensure that you establish quantitative metrics to understand where the organization is today. Employee net promoter score, voluntary attrition, employee satisfaction rating, absenteeism rate, average employee training hours, and average tenure are core KPIs virtually all organizations should be tracking.
" Front-line workers are the face of your organization. Take care of them and they will take care of your customers without management intervention. "
Once the baseline is established, begin to evaluate the root cause. Where is the company meeting employee expectations and where is it deficient? I use a simple engagement taxonomy to evaluate strengths and weaknesses. There are eight key areas of this engagement taxonomy, as stated below and a brief overview of how to assess each. Improve in these areas and your teammate engagement metrics will rise, and so too will the overall customer experience.
1. Training & Development – Is your organization providing adequate training to ensure teammates are successful in their roles? The need for training may seem obvious, but far too many organizations overlook this key element and over rely on shadowing or on the job learning. Not investing in training and development not only ill prepares teammates for their roles but also sends a message to the teams that they are not supported by leadership and are subsequently set up to fail. Ensure training is robust and frequent, not just during onboarding but continuously throughout the employee lifecycle. The result is happier, more competent teams. Everybody wins.
2. Communication – The foundation of any healthy relationship is communication. This holds true for the teammate/organization relationship as well. Poor communication flow often tops the list of employee concerns. The information doesn’t naturally flow top-down or bottoms-up. Siloes develop, misinformation abounds, trust erodes, and dysfunction sets in. Because of this fact, organizations must be deliberate in improving communication flow. Seek to over communicate because while it may seem like overkill, you are probably still not communicating enough in the eyes of the front-line teammate. All-hand meetings, newsletters, regular 1-2-1s, team standups, file-sharing services, and business messaging services are great places to start improving communication flow. In addition, ask your team what and how they want to be communicated with. Malcolm Forbes once said, “The art of conversation lies in listening ."Ensure that, as leaders, you are doing as much or more listening to your teams as you are speaking.
3. Career Pathing – No one wants to feel stifled by a career ceiling. Motivated, talented employees will seek advancement elsewhere if they cannot receive it where they are. Set up a defined career path for your teams that shows them the potential roles available to them and the skills and experience required for consideration during the subsequent stages of their career. Finally, promote from within whenever possible to ensure teammates see the career path working.
4. Compensation – Pay is always going to be a key element of teammate engagement. There is a balance that must be achieved here between what employees expect and what the company can afford. A good starting place is to have your H.R. compensation team perform a market analysis to ensure that your current pay structure is in line with other companies in your industry. This helps to build trust with employees that the company has done their research and they are compensating relative to the market. From here, my recommended approach is to reward your top performers with larger merit raises and variable compensation opportunities. Not all employees provide the same level of contribution or effort to the organization and therefore, the organization should not reward employees homogenously. Reward the teammates that showcase the traits your organization and your customers' value. This will help with the retention of top talent and will help to motivate the rest of the workforce to achieve more.
5. Recognition – Customer service teams do so much for the customer and the organization that often goes unrecognized and underappreciated. They work long hours, wear many hats, and bear the brunt of unhappy customers. A little positive encouragement and recognition go a long way. Find ways to celebrate your stars, including formal monthly teammate spotlights, callouts from leadership, on the spot recognition, and formal rewards programs.
6. Tools, Systems, & Data – Service teams are only as good as the tools, systems, and data they have available to them. Workers desperately want to delight the customer, but if they are inhibited by a lack of information at their fingertips to address customer inquiries, it can seriously hurt morale. Your front-line workers are the vanguard of the customer experience battle. Equip them with what they need to win.
7. Leadership Support – Do teams feel supported by their leaders? Do they feel there is an environment where the status quo can be challenged, tough questions can be asked, and they are treated fairly? In a recent poll of 7,272 U.S. adults, Gallup found that 50 percent of employees left their job "to get away from their manager to improve their overall life at some point in their career." Ensure you have the correct leaders in place and ensure they are supporting their teams adequately.
8. Culture – “Customers will never love a company until the employees love it first” – Simon Sinek. Establishing the correct culture for teammates to thrive is a critical component of any engagement program. However, there is no cookie-cutter approach here. A successful culture is a product of what works for the type of business, the industry, and the people that work there. There are many examples of different company cultures that are very successful in their own right. What is important here is listening to what the teammates say about the current company culture, then making course corrections to improve those sentiments. It’s also critical that once you establish a company culture that fits your mission, you recruit candidates that are a fit for this identity.
