According to Gallup’s 2013 study, “State of the American Workplace,” 70% of employees are not engaged. Engaging customers consistently can’t happen unless a company has fully engaged employees.
How can companies turn this negative paradigm around? Bond Brand Loyalty offered some specific advice during Tuesday’s Loyalty360 webinar titled, “Six Best Practices To Translate Your Customer Experience Vision Into Powerful Front-line Behaviors.”
Apple, The Ritz-Carlton, Disney, Macy’s, and Starbucks are examples of companies that are synonymous with customer experience excellence, according to Kelly Taggart, Director, Customer Experience, Bond Brand Loyalty.
“What are they doing that makes them consistently successful and leaves the rest behind?” Taggart posted to attendees.
Taggart cited the following critical aspects companies should consider to fully engage their employees:
- Companies have to engage employees around a consistent CXP vision that they can own and they can control
- Provide and repeat a specific customer experience vision
- Have a single mobilizing purpose that employees can own and control
- Integral part of delivering a purpose
- Believing in the vision is not the same as delivering on the vision
- Capture hearts and minds
“You have to give them the knowledge and skills to transform their motivation into critical action,” Taggart said.
Sustaining a customer-centric culture on a daily basis is crucial to effectively engaging employees, Taggart said.
Here are the Six Best Practices:
- Start With Your Customer
- Break The Mold
- Create Empathy Through Context
- Practice, Practice, Practice
- Sustain
- Focus on Coaching
Taggart, Catherine Hayos, Senior Coach, Bond Brand Loyalty; and Charles MacPherson (aka “The Butler”), president of MacPherson Associates, discussed a challenge Bond Brand Loyalty experienced with a company whose frontline staff members were struggling to make customers happy−reflected by poor customer satisfaction scores.
Bond Brand Loyalty held an immersive one-day workshop for 900 Service Advisers during a 14-city roadshow across Canada during a two-month period.
The elusive answer was to the question: How do we want our customers to feel?
Customers said the competition was better at delivering hospitality. As a result, Bond Brand Loyalty came up with the following central message for the Service Advisers:
“To treat every customer with the grace and hospitality associated with a professional Butler.”
During “Moments of Truth,” frontline employees must own, control, and repeat that central message. Listening and showing empathy goes a long way
toward creating highly satisfied customers, and hopefully brand advocates.
As a result, the Service Advisors understood not just what the promise was, but how to deliver on that promise.
Hayos said different personalities engender different reactions so frontline employees have to be able to swiftly and successfully manage these disparate situations. Taggart stressed that companies focus on coaching to reinforce successful engagement methods and front-line behaviors.
Taggart outlined five types of coaches:
Change Agent (“The Butler”): Bring different perspectives and to generate new ways of thinking (a-ha! moments”)
Industry SME (“The Expert”): Partner with the change agent to make sure the program delivers relevant and industry-specific context to the ideal of hospitality
Professional Performance Coach (“The Practice”): Recreate typical customer interactions and deliver targeted feedback in the moment
Manager (“The Support”): Reinforce the customer-centric behaviors through informal rewards and rituals (huddles, bright spots)
Peer (“The Mentor”): Share wins and challenges to jointly solution and get better together
Taggart offered three key takeaways:
Don’t think about your employee event in isolation (“If you can’t think outside the box, your employees will struggle to do that,” she said.)
Use it as an opportunity to break the mold and change the mindset
Practice and coach to sustain behaviors