What is our responsibility to engage employees in the customer experience obsession?

Tags

Bruce Temkin, Customer Experience, Employee Engagement, Incent, Inspired, Instruction, Involvement, Learning, Vision

It is a leadership responsibility to engage employees in our customer experience obsession. We know it leads to higher levels of customer engagement and profitability. According to customer experience guru Bruce Temkin, we should consider 5 I’s.

• Employees really want to be inspired with a compelling vision. While salary is important, real engagement comes from an inspired message followed up by real action.
• Employees want to be involved in being part of the solution. The closer an employee is to real customer interactions, the better the insight.
• The need to be informed about what we are doing to improve the customer experience is always essential. Middle management plays a huge role in this on a daily basis.
• We need to create a learning environment where instruction is the norm. Improving the customer experience is a continuous process where our learning is a key.
• Leadership needs to incent employees to be successful. While some of this is about compensation, there are many ways to incent employees that involve soft investments. Have we discovered what works for the members of our team of direct reports?

True employee engagement will lead us to great levels of customer engagement.

Employees are more engaged when you ask for their feedback and act upon what they say.

Tags

Employee Engagement, Questions

There are a couple of things that really create un-engaged employees.

The first one isn’t that difficult to do. That is to ask employees for their feedback. Of course, if you don’t want to know, please don’t ask.

The second, and this takes courage, is to act on what they say. Maybe this isn’t possible 100% of the time because of culture issues or perhaps cost.

Could it be 90% of the time? What is it today?

 

Cvent reports that on average, customer retention rates are 18% higher when employees are highly engaged.

Tags

Culture, Employee Engagement, Loyalty, Retention

Highly engaged employees lead to loyal customers. Study after study reveal this simple fact.

So … Cvent reports that on average, customer retention rates are 18% higher when employees are highly engaged.

Question: Am I building a culture of highly engaged employees? How do I measure it?

Source: How Company Culture Impacts Customer Experience | CustomerThink

“The way your employees feel is the way your customers will feel.” ~Sybil F. Stershic

Tags

Employee Engagement, Investment, ROI, Sybil Stershic

Engagement

As corporate leaders, we make investment decisions all the time. We have investment formulas that help guide those decisions.

All the data concludes that engaged employees lead to higher levels of profits. Do we give investments to improve employee engagement a higher priority than other types of investments? Should we?

Engaged employees are extremely valuable assets. They’re worth even more of your investment.

“The way your employees feel is the way your customers will feel.” –Sybil F. Stershic

The customer has spoken: Every employee must be socially engaged

Tags

Employee Engagement, Social Media

It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in or what position employees hold in your organizational hierarchy. It doesn’t matter if you’re a B2C company or B2B, a nonprofit or for profit, or whether your workforce is younger or older.

Employees in your organization will use collaborative media on the job. There’s not one thing you can do to stop it, so you might as well figure out how to turn it to your advantage.

Fortunately, regardless of industry or hierarchy or demographic, there’s a lot of advantage to be gained.

In virtually every call center, performance is measured based on the number of calls a representative can complete during a shift. That means reps have incentives to get customers off the phone as quickly as possible. And despite the fact that nearly 70% of consumers believe social is a necessary customer channel, 60% of companies have no formal support for social customer care.

That’s a bigger problem than you may think, since the customer experience eats product/service quality for lunch. Customers who are happy with your product or service—even those who are inclined to recommend you to others—could drop you like a an ebola-infected garment for a competitor if you don’t engage them frequently enough with meaningful interactions, according to an Ernst & Young survey.

It’s not just customer support staff who should be engaging customers via social media. Edelman’s Trust Barometer is clear: technical experts are more credible than just about anybody else in your company. When I blogged about a frustration with a Microsoft product several years back, it wasn’t a customer support rep who responded. It was the executive responsible for the product. In his comment, he suggested someone from his staff could offer more insights; one of them did. My subsequent praise for this response undoubtedly led people in my networks to think more highly of Microsoft. In fact, research supports the idea that when one person sings a company’s praises over a great experience, the people with whom she’s connected develop improved perceptions of the organization’s reputation.

It’s not just me. Customer service inquiries on Twitter are up 44%, according to research from SimplyMeasured. According to Mike Lazerow, chief strategy officer for Salesforce.com’s Marketing Cloud, “If you get things wrong, customers have more ways than ever to tell everyone they know about it (as well as several thousand people they’ve never met).”

via The customer has spoken: Every employee must be socially engaged |Customer Service | Blog | Holtz Communications + Technology.

How engaged employees create engaged customers.

Tags

Customer Engagement, Employee Engagement, Forrester Research

Sam Stern at Forrester Research has some great ideas about hiring customer-centric employees.

We know how important it is to get the right people on board, and keeping them passionate about creating amazing experiences for the customer is so critical.

Engaged employees create engaged customers.

Here are a couple of Sam’s ideas.

• Get Customer-Centric Applicants Into The Hiring Funnel. A customer-centric hiring process starts by attracting the right kind of applicants and filtering out the wrong kind. The careers section of a website provides an opportunity for companies to tell applicants what they value in employees. For example, The Container Store’s website describes the company’s commitment to putting employees first and draws a clear distinction from other companies that focus on shareholders first. Contrast that first impression with the careers landing page on Bed Bath & Beyond’s site, where the opening sentence talks about stock performance and its expansion.
•  Focus The Interview Process On Candidate Storytelling. When candidates reach the interview process, it’s time to vet their customer centricity by getting them to tell stories: Have them describe specific examples from past jobs where they exemplified a particular trait or competency. Companies should infuse their interview guides with questions that provide insights about core customer experience competencies. Saskatchewan Government Insurance (SGI) focused on three core competencies of its eight-competency model — customer-driven focus, accountability, and teamwork and collaboration — that it believed were the most important markers for its interviews.
• Reinforce Key Behaviors With Customer-Centric Onboarding. It’s not enough to hire people with the right mindset. Companies also need an onboarding process that creates clear linkages between individuals and their role in delivering the right experience. Enter learning maps: visual representations of existing or desired states that facilitate training and coaching sessions. They can provide a framework for customer experience training and empower employees with enough understanding of the experience to make their own decisions and adjustments. Barclays Africa worked with consulting firm Trainiac to create large-scale visualizations that are part of the onboarding process.

Source: How To Hire And Onboard Customer-Centric Employees | Forrester Research

What are the rules of employee engagement for a great customer experience?

Tags

Customer Experience, Employee Engagement, Gallup

More and more, we are beginning to recognize that a key to the customer experience is highly engaged employees. Gallup has lots of data on the correlation. Building a digital business will require strategies and initiatives to improve employee engagement. It should also be a key lagging indicator for the customer experience.

People are central to all we do. Goals are important but engaged people make it happen.

Engaged employees are the backbone of an organization. But while business leaders recognize the importance of an engaged workforce, several organizations have been facing high levels of disengagement for a number of years. In fact, numerous reports have pointed towards a serious problem in the United States. According to the latest Gallup report on the State of the American Workplace, only 30 percent of employees in the United States are engaged, while the other 70 percent are not reaching their full potential. While there is no magic recipe to achieve and retain high levels of employee engagement, there are certainly a number of ingredients that, when combined, will steer organizations in the right direction. These components are not dissimilar from the ones needed to have a successful relationship and manage a household.

via Employee Engagement | Rules of Employee Engagement.

Trouble with the Curve? Why Microsoft is Ditching Stack Rankings for employee evaluations.

Tags

Employee Engagement, Gallup, Marcus Buckingham, Performance Evaluations

Does your company evaluate “on the curve”?

It is quite possible they do. You may not even know it if they do.

I’ve long been a fan of Marcus Buckingham’s work going back to Gallup and his groundbreaking work on employee engagement. This is definitely worth reading. It is well paying attention to since there is such a high correlation between employee engagement and customer engagement.

If we are to obsess about the customer experience we have to obsess about the employee experience.

No more curve,” said Lisa Brummel, Microsoft’s EVP of HR.

The world we are leaving behind is unquestionably a deeply unpopular world—not only do most managers dislike their performance management system, but most human resources professionals don’t like theirs, either. One cause of this dissatisfaction is a misunderstanding of motives: managers think that their performance management system is designed to help them accelerate the performance of their people. I would argue that a performance management system should be designed primarily for this purpose, and indeed some purport to be—but scratch the surface and you quickly learn that they aren’t.

Instead the purpose of these systems is twofold: first, to allocate compensation fairly; and second, to align each individual’s goals with the values and strategies of the company. These aren’t nefarious purposes—they are actually rather sensible—but they are clearly secondary or at least tangential to helping employees become more productive. 

Companies could probably alleviate some of the current dissatisfaction by being more straightforward that the performance management system is not for you, the employee; it is instead a company system, designed to ensure a bell curve of compensation, and alignment to company goals. Not a particularly uplifting positioning, I grant you, but at least employees and managers would be able to judge it on its own terms.

Of course, this wouldn’t fix the underlying problem of ratings – which is that, for a variety of reasons, they turn out to be bogus (a topic I will address in a follow-up post). Perhaps most managers have long suspected this. Perhaps their dissatisfaction with performance management systems stems from this suspicion. Either way, Microsoft’s rejection of ratings has done all of us a service. It shines a harsh spotlight on the approach that defines performance management today, and helps others see that it is seriously overrated.

 Trouble with the Curve? Why Microsoft is Ditching Stack Rankings – Marcus Buckingham – Harvard Business Review

In the world of customer experience, what does the path look like?

Tags

Brand, Bruce Temkin, Customer Experience, Employee Engagement, Leadership, Maturity, Metrics

Customer experience does matter. It isn’t easy to get there but a road-map does exist.

Temkin Group’s research shows that companies evolve through six stages of CX maturity, but the higher levels of maturity take a significant jump in focus and commitment. What does that path look like? Take a look at this infographic.

Source: Customer Experience: The Path From Fluff to Tough (Infographic) | Customer Experience Matters®

The Untapped Value of Employee Engagement

Tags

Employee Engagement

There is tons of data to show that engaged employees create engaged customers. Consider this about engaged employees:

1. Always try their hardest at work.
2. Stay late to work if something needs to be done after the normal workday ends.
3. Do something good for the company even if it isn’t expected of them.
4. Make a recommendation for an improvement.
5. Recommend a friend or relative apply for a job.

And the list goes on.

via The Untapped Value of Employee Engagement Infographic | Customer Experience Matters.

Employee engagement is foundational to donor engagement

Tags

Customer Experience, Donor Engagement, Employee Engagement

Employee Engagement

Employee engagement is foundational to donor engagement. It is highly unlikely that an employee who hates their job or who is disengaged from what they do will create a great donor experience.

Employee engagement, by any number of studies and research reports, leads to higher levels of nonprofit results. Most notable is Gallup’s work in this area evidenced by Gallup’s own Q12 engagement survey. Gallup scientists spent decades writing and testing hundreds of questions, because their wording and order mean everything when it comes to accurately measuring engagement. Their research yielded Gallup’s Q12 survey: the 12 questions that measure the most important elements of employee engagement. Gallup has studied survey results from more than 25 million employees around the world.

‘The lost suitcase and a grumpy old man’ – a story about employee engagement – Blog post by Ian Golding  – Customer centric organizations tend to have a number of things in common. They typically have management teams who collectively believe in the importance of doing things with customer’s interests firmly in mind. They usually design their customer journey(s) to meet and exceed customer expectations. They often recognize that getting things wrong may happen, but that correcting them is a vitally important skill. One thing you can guarantee, is that customer centric organizations do not just put customers first – they also put their employees first as well.

Customer Experience Leadership Requires Engaged Employees – One of the Six Laws of Customer Experience is “Unengaged employees don’t create engaged customers.” That’s why Employee Engagement is one of Temkin Group’s four customer experience core competencies.

The 5 Factors that Ruin Employee Engagement – Experts outline the five main drivers of employee disengagement that business leaders need to steer clear of at all costs. Employees are the backbone of organizations. But despite having the knowledge that an engaged workforce correlates to positive donor experiences and growing donation, high levels of disengagement still plague many organizations. In fact, the latest Gallup report on the State of the American Workplace notes that despite changes to the U.S. economy since 2000, these have not been translated to the American workplace. The recent recession led to a decrease in employment opportunities, making workers less inclined to leave their job because of low engagement and employers less incentivized to ensure that their staffers were happy. However, while the tide is slowly changing, many workplaces are not changing their practices and investing in initiatives that ensure a high level of employee engagement.

What engages employees the most or the ten C’s of employee engagement – A professor in a recent executive education program on leadership elicited a lot of laughs by telling the following joke: “A CEO was asked how many people work in his company: ‘About half of them,’ he responded.” After the session, several participants put a more serious face on the problem when, while chatting, they bemoaned the fact that, in their organization, a significant number of people had mentally “checked out.”

Why is employee engagement foundational to customer engagement?

Tags

Customer Engagement, Employee Engagement, Gallup, Temkin

Employee Engagement

Employee engagement is foundational to customer engagement. It is highly unlikely that an employee who hates their job or who is disengaged from what they do will create a great customer experience.

Employee engagement, by any number of studies and research reports, leads to higher levels of business results. Most notable is Gallup’s work in this area evidenced by Gallup’s own Q12 engagement survey. Gallup scientists spent decades writing and testing hundreds of questions, because their wording and order mean everything when it comes to accurately measuring engagement. Their research yielded Gallup’s Q12 survey: the 12 questions that measure the most important elements of employee engagement. Gallup has studied survey results from more than 25 million employees around the world.

• The lost suitcase and a grumpy old man’ – a story about employee engagement – Blog post by Ian Golding  – Customer centric organizations tend to have a number of things in common. They typically have management teams who collectively believe in the importance of doing things with customer’s interests firmly in mind. They usually design their customer journey(s) to meet and exceed customer expectation. They often recognize that getting things wrong may happen, but that correcting them is a vitally important skill. One thing you can guarantee, is that customer centric organizations do not just put customers first – they also put their employees first as well.
• Customer Experience Leadership Requires Engaged Employees – One of the Six Laws of Customer Experience is “Unengaged employees don’t create engaged customers.” That’s why Employee Engagement is one of Temkin Group’s four customer experience core competencies.
• The 5 Factors that Ruin Employee Engagement – Experts outline the five main drivers of employee disengagement that business leaders need to steer clear of at all costs. Employees are the backbone of organizations. But despite having the knowledge that an engaged workforce correlates to positive customer experiences and growing sales, high levels of disengagement still plague many organizations. In fact, the latest Gallup report on the State of the American Workplace notes that despite changes to the U.S. economy since 2000, these have not been translated to the American workplace. The recent recession led to a decrease in employment opportunities, making workers less inclined to leave their job because of low engagement and employers less incentivized to ensure that their staffers were happy. However, while the tide is slowly changing, many workplaces are not changing their practices and investing in initiatives that ensure a high level of employee engagement.
• What engages employees the most or the ten C’s of employee engagement – A professor in a recent executive education program on leadership elicited a lot of laughs by telling the following joke: “A CEO was asked how many people work in his company: ‘About half of them,’ he responded.” After the session, several participants put a more serious face on the problem when, while chatting, they bemoaned the fact that, in their organization, a significant number of people had mentally “checked out.”

How to make employee engagement a key metric

Tags

Bruce Temkin, Customer Experience, Employee Engagement, Metric

When employee engagement becomes foundational to how you do business as a part of people initiatives, it will become a key strategy for organizational planning as well.

There could be a goal, something like “Improve employee engagement from X to Y by DATE”. Establishing lead indicators will drive change as well. Clear dashboards with weekly accountability sessions will make improvement real for management. With the clear link to customer engagement established, customer engagement will improve as well.

According to an article by Bruce Temkin, since 2007, “Bombardier Aerospace’s annual employee engagement and enablement survey has given all employees a voice within the organization. In 2012, 93% of employees completed the survey. Managers are evaluated based on the engagement levels of their employees. To create an environment that ensures performance, every leader has an annual target for employee engagement.

Employee Engagement Define It, Measure It and Put It to Work in Your Organization – Research by APQC, one of the leading proponents of process and performance improvement, has yielded key insights into what engagement is, how it can be measured and how it can be integrated into organizational culture.

Here are the key ideas:

1. Employee engagement is a key to the customer experience and should be a key metric for the C-Suite
2. Setting a quantifiable employee engagement goal is essential
3. Strategies that reflect leading indicators that lead to achieving the goal make a huge difference

How to let creative talent figure out how to focus on the customer experience

Tags

Customer Experience, Employee Engagement, Goal

Customer Expectations

Jordan Cohen, in the Harvard Business Review tells a great story that drives the point home about empowerment. For the digital executive, it makes sense to focus on outcomes of the customer experience and let creative talent figure out how to execute that for the customer.

There is much that needs to be done to improve the experience for our customers. We need as many employees as possible focused on that improvement. Establishing clear goals and creating a continuous improvement process is essential.

Consider this story.

I will never forget the experiences of getting my first suit. I was 12 years old and my father took me to a department store on 18th street in New York City. I was very excited; this was the transition to feeling grown up. A real milestone. I would have a suit like all the grown men I knew.

At the store, we headed straight downstairs to the boys department and I tried on several cream-colored suits (very mid-1970s Saturday Night Fever). Once we found the right one, the tailor had me stand on a box in front of a mirror. He then went to work pinning and marking for the alteration. When he finished he stepped back, and he and my father looked at the suit pinned on me. In the mirror, I saw my father point to the back and shoulder of the jacket and sleeve and then shake his head no. The tailor went back to work, re-pinning and re-marking. Once again, my father shook his head no. So the tailor added padding under my shoulder. Still, my father shook his head. After about 30 minutes of back-and-forth, finally my father nodded and my cream colored, three-piece suit with bell bottom pants went off for alteration.

For me, the experience was long and boring and not as exciting as I anticipated. On the car ride home I asked my father why he didn’t just tell the tailor what to do (my father was a clothing manufacturer). He explained, “if I told the tailor what to do, he would have done exactly what I had requested — but then if the jacket didn’t fit properly, he would have said, ‘I did what you told me to do’. On the other hand, if I told him what we are trying to achieve (for the jacket to lay flat with no pulling in the back, shoulder, or sleeve) he could be responsible for the outcome I described.”

via Stop Telling Your Employees What to Do – Jordan Cohen – Harvard Business Review.

​OPM makes new promises to protect hacked employees. How confident are you that they can or will?

Tags

Cyber Security, Employee Engagement, FBI

If you work for the Federal government, this is your worst nightmare. Your social security number is no longer secure and is quite possibly in the hands of the Chinese.  It is likely to also be in the hands of criminals already who can make your life miserable for a very long time.

You can read details of the new plan to protect those affected by the hack here but it is not reassuring since you are already exposed.

Ensuring the integrity, privacy and security of employee data is key to a trusting and engaged workforce. Without that foundation, nothing else that is done will make a difference.

We’re moving into science-fiction disaster territory as the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) admits that more than 22 million employees personal records have been stolen. But, the OPM has a new, improved plan to protect their records.

This 22 million number is even higher than the FBI’s leaked 18 million figure. On an OPM site, the agency revealed the most likely victims are those who “underwent a background investigation through OPM in 2000 or afterwards.”

In short, if you filled out a form SF-86, Questionnaire for National Security Positions; SF-85, Questionnaire for Non-Sensitive Positions; or SF-85P, Questionnaire for Public Trust Positions, your records are toast. Or, as OPM put it, “it is highly likely that you are impacted by the incident involving background investigations. If you underwent a background investigation prior to 2000, you still may be impacted, but it is less likely.”

Before we get into the details of the plan that’s to make this all better, you should know what’s been revealed. These “records include identification details such as Social Security Numbers; residency and educational history; employment history; information about immediate family and other personal and business acquaintances; health, criminal and financial history; and other details.”

via ​OPM makes new promises to protect hacked employees | ZDNet.

There are calls for Katherine Archuleta, director of the federal Office of Personnel Management, to resign. She said she has no plans to step down and is committed to continuing her work for the agency. One day after saying that, she resigned.

But Archuleta has no background in tech or cyber-security. In the official White House press release on her first day, Archuleta was heralded as “the first Latina” to run the OPM and someone who “[w]ith her breadth of experience as an educator, public administrator, and community leader, Katherine Archuleta possesses an abundance of skills to bring talented people together with different ideas and fresh perspectives to strengthen our federal workforce.”

via http://dailycaller.com/2015/07/09/opm-head-has-no-tech-or-cyber-security-experience-wont-resign/#ixzz3fV3pq6y0

How do employees learn how to focus on the customer experience?

Tags

Employee Engagement, Learning

Learning how to create amazing customer experiences doesn’t happen by magic. You can hire for the competencies in many cases. Beyond that, we all need to continue to learn. Learning happens at two levels. We need learning initiatives for the entire company. We also need them tailored to each department. You don’t have to start from scratch by hiring for new skills. Employees love to learn and engaged employees will appreciate the opportunity to expand their competencies.

While employees may learn this on their own initiative, it is highly likely that a systematic learning program will build the culture sooner rather than later. Senior and middle management commitment to learning makes a difference.

Here are the key ideas:

1. Learning is a huge part of employee engagement.
2. Start by designing a simple curriculum.
3. Begin sooner rather than later. Don’t wait for a 5 day program when you can start with a 1 hour “learn and lunch” session.
4. Encourage employee engagement in all learning activities with active involvement of management.

Customer experience makes the business world go ’round, for those organizations that fail to satisfy are ultimately doomed to fail. Hence, as customer experience initiatives shift from luxury to necessity, many brands have come to institute CX curricula in an effort to align employee behaviors with enterprisewide goals for enhanced customer service.

Brands like BMO Financial Group, Cleveland Clinic, The San Antonio Spurs, and Nationwide Mutual Insurance have created their own CX curricula, which expand upon traditional training methods by putting an emphasis on customer experience. Here, we explore the inner workings of successful CX curricula plans and the essential characteristics necessary for implementing training initiatives of their own

via Spotlight | Exploring the Inner Workings of CX Curricula.

Does employee satisfaction matter? Is it all about ping pong tables and more time off?

Tags

Customer Engagement, Employee Engagement, Employee Satisfaction

There is a distinction between actively engaged employees and satisfied employees. There is a caution to be careful in what you are measuring. It could lead to happy and unproductive employees. It could lead to disengaged customers.

The digital executive is focused on balancing employee engagement with customer engagement. One should lead to another. If it doesn’t it is a clue something is wrong with the measures.

Fortune 1000 executives often come up to me and say, “Our company culture is robust — our employees have an 85% satisfaction rate.” Good for you. You have ruined your workplace. Ask any employee, “What will satisfy you?” and the answer is easy: free lunches, more vacation time, latte machines — and don’t forget a ping pong table.

Problem is, measuring workers’ satisfaction or happiness levels is just not enough to retain star performers and build a successful business. You think giving more vacation time is great? Try this on: Engaged employees who took less than one week off from work in a year had 25% higher overall well-being than actively disengaged associates — even those who took six weeks or more of vacation time.

via Employee Satisfaction Doesn’t Matter | LinkedIn.

Health insurer Anthem hit by massive cybersecurity breach

Tags

Cyber Security, Employee Engagement

Cyber Security

Lurking in our technology systems, many times for months on end, criminals are looking and finding ways to compromise our security.

Employee engagement in this case, becomes a huge issue. Employees want a safe place to work. Their engagement hinges on this core premise.

Health insurer Anthem Inc, which has nearly 40 million U.S. customers, said late on Wednesday that hackers had breached one of its IT systems and stolen personal information relating to current and former consumers and employees.

via Health insurer Anthem hit by massive cybersecurity breach | Reuters.

What does employee engagement mean to the Digital Executive?

Tags

Customer Experience, Employee Engagement, Gallup

Employee engagement is foundational to customer engagement. It is highly unlikely that an employee who hates their job or who is disengaged from what they do will create a great customer experience.

Employee engagement, by any number of studies and research reports, leads to higher levels of business results. Most notable is Gallup’s work in this area evidenced by Gallup’s own Q12 engagement survey. Gallup scientists spent decades writing and testing hundreds of questions, because their wording and order mean everything when it comes to accurately measuring engagement. Their research yielded Gallup’s Q12 survey: the 12 questions that measure the most important elements of employee engagement. Gallup has studied survey results from more than 25 million employees around the world.

Employee engagement is essential to a great customer experience.

Engaged employees lead to business results. In fact, the 10th annual edition of Workplace America found that 83 percent of employers in the United States consider employee engagement as a strategic priority, with 64 percent budget and allocate funds specifically for this reason.Yet, numerous studies have pointed to a major problem of disengaged employees, especially in the United States, with a recent one, by DeskAlerts, reporting that a staggering 72 percent of workers in America aren’t engaged with their work and their employers.

via Employee Engagement | Bringing Employee Engagement into the 21st Century.

 

Why creating great employee experiences is important to the customer experience

Tags

Customer Experience, Employee Engagement, Employee Experience, Forrester Research

Our people create the experience, whether it is digital or in person. We can’t seperate the employee experience from the customer experience.

As digital executives, we need to focus a huge amount of time and resources on amazing employee experiences.

TJ Keitt, at Forrester Research, has given us a great framework for looking at the employee experience.

It’s easy to get swept up in the power of the digital age, where smart mobile devices and cloud services open the door for new and exciting ways to engage customers. We think a lot about how these technologies will create enticing customer experiences (CX), making these digital touchpoints the face of the brand. I admit, as a technology fan, I’m enamored with this idea. But I’m also someone who thinks a lot about technology and the workforce, so I was equally animated by a conversation I recently had with the head of a CX consultancy. He warned that businesses risk over rotating on technology, viewing their people as receding in importance in delivering satisfactory customer experiences. He went on to say that businesses that make this make do so at their own peril. I agree.

Via You Need Great Employee Experiences To Create Great Customer Experiences | Forrester Blogs

Employee Experience Framework

Why employee engagement is important — Examples from Doug Conant, former CEO at Campbell Soup

Tags

Campbell Soup, Customer Focus, Doug Conant, Employee Engagement

Being customer focused is about how engaged our employees are on any given day. Engaged employees lead to engage customers.

No one knows this better than Doug Conant. From 2001 to 2011, Doug served as CEO and President of the Campbell Soup Company. He was the 11th leader of this iconic company’s 141-year history – faced with reversing a precipitous decline in market value.

Conant dramatically transformed the global leadership team, reconfigured the portfolio, cut costs, and made integral strategic investments. These visionary changes resulted in cumulative shareholder returns in the top tier of the global food industry.

Here is a short video where he explains his approach to employee engagement.

 

Conant’s mission to achieve superior employee engagement levels was a crucial contributor to the company’s exemplary performance. Under his leadership, employee engagement at Campbell Soup went from being among the worst in the Fortune 500 to being consistently among the best. The company was also celebrated as a leader in social responsibility and ethical leadership during his tenure.

A lifelong advocate for ethical practices and corporate responsibility, Conant remains actively involved with many non-profits and advocacy programs.

Read more about his work with public advocacy here.

Why we should consider a 4 day work week

Tags

Customer Engagement, Employee Engagement, Flexible, People, Workforce

Sorry, we are closed

Are we working too much? What happened to the 40 hour work week? Do you dream for TGIT — Thank God it is Thursday?

The sad reality is that most of us work more than 40 hours a week.  85.8 percent of men and 66.5 percent of women in American routinely work more than 40 hours a week. Most of us also feel that our companies (or our own business) is not able to offer the kind of benefits and perks employees crave.

While employees are working longer, they’re not necessarily working smarter. A recent Gallup poll found 70 percent of the American workforce is disengaged on the job, leading to more than $550 billion in lost productivity annually. Workers are looking for better flexible time options, which is why two in five working adults would be willing to give up some portion of their salary for more flexibility.

via Thursday is the New Friday: Embracing the 4-Day Work Week | LinkedIn.

So, is it time to consider, I mean seriously consider, a 4 day work week? The are companies experimenting with 4 – 10 hour days.  If the data is right, you would still get more than 40 hours so why not allow employees some more flexibility? 

Are you keeping score of employee contributions?

Tags

Cross-functional, Culture, Employee Engagement, Feedback, Gamify, Recognition, Transparent

Employee Engagement

Engaged employees create a culture where customers are highly engaged. Study after study demonstrates it. Engaged employees, who work with customers, know what kind of things need to be done to improve the customer experience. Having a systematic feedback system is very important. Employees want to know their ideas are valued and acted upon.

A great idea can catapult an organization into financial superstardom. In fact, most successful organizations owe their accomplishments to a synchronization of great ideas that were executed upon. However, the provenance of winning ideas isn’t solely the C-suite and each employee is in a great position to make suggestions that will help improve the bottom line.

In the past years organizations have increasingly found new ways to collect feedback from their employees, understanding that this not only helps boost engagement levels—which are worryingly low in the United States—but can be instrumental in capturing nuggets of information which can be leveraged to improve business results. As 1to1 Media highlights in this article, some companies are finding novel ways to collect employee feedback.

via Six Ways to Keep Score of Employee Contributions.

Here are some ideas to consider:

1. Establish a culture which fosters open communication
2. Provide avenues for idea sharing
3. Introduce recognition throughout the process
4. Create cross-functional teams
5. Gamify the process
6. Be transparent

 

Are you a customer-focused or operations-focused company?

Tags

Customer Focus, Customer Service, Employee Engagement, Empowerment, Hiring, Leadership, Operations, Training

I want you to focus on your customers

There are differences on how to approach your business. You get to decide. How conscious is that choice? Has inertia taken over?

It is important to think through, plan and execute around creating a better customer experience.

Some companies really understand customer service. They know how to hire for it, train for it and deliver it. Other companies claim to give customer service, but in reality, they are grounded in an operations mentality with rules and policies that allow for little flexibility, preventing them from being anything more than just average or satisfactory. 

via Six Differences Between Customer-Focused Companies and Operations-Focused Companies.

Here are some ideas to focus on:

1. Empowerment – employees can make decisions in the best interest of the customer
2. Hiring – bring people on who fit the customer-focused culture
3. Training – spend time and money on soft skills like relationship building
4. Leadership – create a vision and mission that is focused on the customer
5. People first – employees and their engagement make a difference
6. Customer service – service comes first, no matter what

 

Are workers who can and do work anywhere (including home) more engaged?

Tags

Anywhere, Employee Engagement, Harvard Business Review, Mobile, Telecommuting, Work

I am a remote, or as I prefer to believe, an anywhere worker. I can work anywhere. And I do. It works for me and a lot of my colleagues and friends. We are a very productive and motivated group. I love it when I find evidence to support what I do and believe.

What do you think? Are you more productive being an “anywhere” worker?

If you work from home, you’ve probably gotten an eye roll or two from your office-bound friends. But as consultant Scott Edinger explains, working from home or in a remote office can lead to increased productivity, more effective communication, and better teamwork.

Who is more engaged and more committed to their work and rates their leaders the highest?

A. People who work in the office

B. People who work remotely

If you picked A, you might be as surprised as the investment firm I worked with recently, which found in reviewing results of a 360-degree feedback process that the answer was, in fact, B.

The team members who were not in the same location with their leaders were more engaged and committed— and rated the same leader higher—than team members sitting right nearby. While the differences were not enormous (a couple of tenths of a point in both categories), they were enough to provoke some interesting speculations as to why this might be happening.

via Why Remote Workers Are More (Yes, More) Engaged.