Why Your Employees are Key to a Great Customer Experience
As the bandwagon fills up with companies elevating customer experience to the top of their strategic priorities, it is more important than ever they not forget the real accelerator of a truly positive experience – an engaged, connected, and inspiring employee experience.
Technology, user-centered design, journey maps – they are all wonderful tools and enablers of great customer experience. Digital Transformation is upon us, and investments in all of these are necessary to set the foundation upon which competitive differentiation is built. Cloud platforms for CRM, client surveys, and marketing data provide near real-time indicators of the reach and impact of client engagement efforts.
The Hiring Challenge
The challenge for companies now rests in how that data is used to gain new customers and grow the lifetime customer value of those they have. One important answer lies with the employee experience. According to a February 2017 Deloitte Insights article, The employee experience: Culture, engagement, and beyond, “nearly 80 percent of executives rated employee experience very important (42 percent) or important (38 percent), but only 22 percent reported that their companies were excellent at building a differentiated employee experience.” Put more simply, in a group of 10 companies, only TWO of them feel they are doing well with their employees.
“Nearly 80% of executives rated employee experience very important or important, but only 22% reported that their companies were excellent at building differentiated employee experience.”
Why is this significant? Employees who feel a sense of engagement are more loyal. Loyal employees stay with a company, gaining invaluable knowledge and recruiting new co-workers who share similar traits. Tenured, skilled employees create critical intellectual property for a company. Also, a positive employee experience breeds trust in senior leadership. Trusting employees support company initiatives, advocate for positive change, and feel confident raising concerns with executives. So how can a company deliver on the promise of a great employee experience?
I borrow here from the pillars of The Select Group’s purpose statement, “Impact Lives One Positive Experience at a Time.” Our three pillars help us achieve this purpose:
Listen, Deliver and Exceed
Listen to your employees.
Provide a survey channel for them to offer feedback to executives at least once per year—ideally more often. Capture their feedback, determine key trends, and create a priorities list of things the company can realistically do in response to employee survey data.
Deliver.
It’s incredibly important for companies to deliver on employee feedback. This can take the form of specific change initiatives, or simply a follow-up to the employees recognizing their feedback and letting them know what can or can’t be done. Silence here can be a death sentence for employee trust.
Exceed.
Once the priorities are defined, follow through with an aim to exceed employee expectations. Celebrate the changes, tie company success to employee satisfaction, and thank them often for their part in positive changes that are made.
Unemployment is at record lows. A growing millennial workforce is much more open to leaving one company for another when the company misses the mark on employee experience. Do you want them jumping off of your bandwagon and onto another? If not, Listen. Deliver. Exceed.
This post is from our CXO Blog series, written by Jeff Zirker, our Chief Experience Officer (CXO). See the rest of his collection here.
About the Author:
Jeff Zirker started with TSG in 2015 after more than 22 years with a leading U.S. technology company. His passion for people has led to the implementation of new processes and programs across the company designed to enhance customer experience. No stranger to adventure, Jeff once spent two weeks on an uninhabited Hawaiian island.