Embedding customer-centricity into the employee lifecycle is a crucial step toward integrating customer experience and employee engagement initiatives, according to Matt Roddan, Vice President and Head of U.S. Employee Research, ORC International.
During Thursday’s Loyalty360 webinar, “Integrate Your Customer Experience and Employee Engagement Initiatives to Drive Business Performance,” which was presented by ORC International, Roddan and Linda Shea, Global Managing Director Customer Strategies, at ORC International, shared with attendees the importance to align employee engagement and customer experience initiatives with organizational strategy and purpose to drive business performance.
Roddan said to embed customer-centricity into the employee lifecycle, companies should attract and hire for customer-centricity; train and align with a specific customer experience to be delivered, and measure employee perceptions of the customer experience.
“Identify and address skill gaps,” Roddan said. “It’s important to appeal to the types of people who are able and want to deliver that customer experience. There should be more measurement of the customer experience through the eyes of the employees.”
Aligning employee engagement with customer needs and strategy, Shea said, because employee engagement alone is not enough. Companies need to understand the full journey of the customer from initial exposure to the brand to longer-term lifetime value as a customer.
Shea discussed the business case for aligning employees and customers.
“Your employees are the differentiator,” she said.
Shea used Costco as an example because the company pays it cashiers at a much higher rate (more than $15 per hour) than other comparable stores. Costco boasts a 76% employee retention rate.
Shea shared a quote from Costco CEO Craig Jelinek: “If you treat consumers with respect and treat employees with respect, good things are going to happen to you.”
She also used The Container Store as an example of a truly customer-centric company that holds employee engagement in high esteem.
“We start by putting our employees first in everything that we do,” according to officials from The Container Store. “We believe that if we take better care of our employees than anyone else–by paying them better and training them more–that they in turn will take better care of our customers than anyone else.”
At The Container Store, where there is a 90% employee retention rate, employees receive 30 times more training than the average retail employee and are trained to respond to customers’ every need.
Roddan said a customer-centric culture requires alignment comprised of three fundamental building blocks: A Strategic Narrative (intent), Employee Engagement, and Customer Input.
“What we are finding is many organizations say they are doing these things, but they are doing them in silos, and not in a holistic manner,” Roddan said. “These things individually are not sufficient. The important thing is the overlap. This is where customer-centricity is really formed.”
Alignment leads to enhanced performance in areas such as HR metrics, strong financial performance, customer experience, customer equity, business performance, and employee engagement.
“When you work in silos, you tend to replicate efforts,” Shea said. “Working together minimizes duplication of efforts. We ask our employees to wear a variety of different hats.”
Those “hats” include: brand ambassador; matchmaker, competitive investigator, emotional connection, problem solver, innovator, and optimizer.
“Those hats we ask employees to wear, we can only do so when they are informed, have the right tools and metrics in place to support the knowledge and the integration of that knowledge into the organization,” Shea added.
Three emerging trends include data alignment, smarter research and reporting, and integration.
With data alignment, Shea said companies should ask the following questions:
· What are you trying to learn?
· Who are you trying to learn from?
· When are you trying to learn?
The customer questions should be aligned with internal initiatives, processes, and metrics. Explore more of the “why’s” behind the experience and in support of broad data through verbatim commentary.
Link service delivery evaluations to specific employee teams and/or individuals.
Focus service evaluations on customer engagement and emotional connections and less on basic delivery capabilities. The ability to link information from different groups of employees and customers is essential.
“Frontline employees are really shaping the customer experience,” Roddan said. “Employee and customer relationships correlate with business outcomes.”
Shea and Roddan said the real benefits to the business of driving both employee engagement and customer expectations are:
· Retaining at least three more colleagues per year
· Loyalty card recruitment is 33% higher
· Absenteeism is 10% lower
· Financial turnover is $11,000 more a month
· Net Promoter Score is 9% higher
· Satisfaction with service is up to 11% higher
“A customer-centric culture requires alignment,” Shea said.
· Strategic narrative (intent): What is your customer experience vision?
· Employee engagement: What do you look for when recruiting employees?
· Customer input: How do you provide the organization with understanding of what customers see, want and think?