Improve the Colleague Experience to Deliver Good Customer Experience
We do what we do, and we do it together! For a better customer experience.
I think we can all agree that the linkage between customer and employee experiences is critical to delivering on your brand’s promise. For years, we’ve said happy employees make happy customers. Unfortunately, I think that statement, while true, minimizes the importance of an engaged workforce delivering better customer experiences. There are many facets to ensuring that happy employees maintain satisfied customers for an organization. What is sometimes overlooked in the process of improving both types of experiences, is a third experience, the colleague experience.
The Colleague Experience differs from these two. The focus of the colleague experience directly relates to the effectiveness of our interaction with one another. I think we would all agree that every employee has a role in achieving a better CX for your organization even though not all employees believe it. Often, those employees engaged in adjacent operations such as Accounting, I/T, HR, etc., believe that since they don’t interact directly with customers, they don’t impact the customer experiences. Nothing could be further from the truth. Everyone is dependent on the other to deliver on our customer commitments. The field sales representative or contact center agent may be front and center with the customer but they are deeply dependent on a host of experts across the business to deliver the product or service they are selling or supporting.
Who hasn’t lamented these situations: the sales team’s complaints about marketing not generating enough leads; the operation team has doubts about the most recent sales forecast ; or the customer service team has concerns about human resources being too slow to recruit, hire and train the right people to work with customer inquiries? We use terms like “throwing work over the wall” or “we work in functional silos” to describe the the reasoning behind why we aren’t working better together as colleagues with specific skills in a variety of business disciplines. How do we eliminate this phenomenon and create better colleague experiences?
Here are some ideas:
Create inter-departmental operating mechanisms. How does workflow through each department? What are the dependencies each function has on the other? Understand the processes going on just prior to your function and immediately after it.
Establish internal service level agreements and commitments. Just as you do with customers, create meaningful metrics to hold one another accountable. Take time to understand the functional requirements of your adjacent departments and identify and fix pain points.
Invest in the tools for a new normal. Ensure employees have the right equipment in their homes. Avoid the stop-gap workarounds and make the necessary investments. As difficult as it may be to spend the money, eliminating this barrier can help colleagues continue meeting their objectives and delivering on their commitments.
Hold Virtual “Lunch and Learns”. Ask others to learn about what your department does and the value you add to the experience. Welcome ideas for improvement and how your function might help others be more successful. Share a day-in-the life-of profiles of employees within your department.
Leadership Engagement and Presence. Invite executives to engage with sales reps, listen in on customer calls with contact center agents to improve their knowledge of what happens on the front line. You’ll be amazed at how just one or two sessions like this with your executives will have long lasting effects on how they view the customer experience.
Celebrate Wins. When something good happens, celebrate it with not only your department but others that have helped you achieve the win. Post it on internal sites and recognize individuals who made a difference in the customer experience. Especially recognize the “behind-the-scenes” employees who don’t often get the spotlight shined on the fine work they do for customers.
Talent Rotations. Walk in someone else’s shoes for a day by shadowing a machine operator, taking on a project in another department or accepting a short-term assignment in a different part of your organization. The best career paths are the ones that zig-zag across an organization rather than strictly up or down.
Create a unifying metric. It’s so important for an organization to be unified in its focus on achieving one unifying metric. No, I’m not talking about your Net Promoter Score. Instead create a metric like customer satisfaction or effort score so that everyone understands it and knows what role they play in achieving it. Then reward employees for achieving it each month!
Doing any one of these ideas can help improve the feeling that all employees create a better CX. Ensuring colleagues have the right tools to do their jobs and the mechanisms in place to serve customers is so important right now. Today each of us is being asked to change the wheels on a car we are driving down the highway at 65 miles per hour! What you select may depend on where your organization falls in the customer experience journey. Whatever you choose will make the “colleague experience” better.
Now more than ever as we begin to emerge from the pandemic, we’ve learned that every employee, every colleague has a role in achieving a better CX for your organization. The traditional concept of job divisiveness… “this is my job and that is yours” has fallen by the wayside. Everyone’s doing their best to get the job done. Everyone is dependent on the other to deliver on our customer commitments.
There is plenty being written about how to navigate your organization’s customer experience during this time of crisis. Above all else – despite everything happening around us – find time to laugh at a joke; take a walk and appreciate the blossoms of Spring; or simply enjoying your time together as colleagues.
We do what we do, and we do it together!