The Colleague Experience: Ten Ways to Engage Your Colleagues.

There’s been plenty written about how to improve your customer experience.  And of course, there’s equally as much written on the employee experience as well.  Recognizing how important the linkage between these two is imperative to improving both experiences.  The Colleague Experience differs from these two.  For nearly ten years, I’ve been talking about how the colleague experience is about how we interact with one another to achieve an improved experience for our customers.   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 back office or adjacent operations such as Accounting, I/T, HR, etc., think that since they don’t interact directly with customers, they don’t impact the customer experience.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Everyone is dependent on the other to deliver on our customer commitments. 

Examples of a colleague experience include the sales team’s reliance on marketing to generate leads, operations’ dependency on sales to properly forecast order volumes, or customer service collaborating with talent acquisition to recruit, hire and train the right people to work with customer inquiries.  Unfortunately, these internal dependencies can be overlooked when designing a better CX.  We use terms like “throwing work over the wall” or “we work in functional silos” to describe the phenomenon of not working better together as colleagues with specific skills in a variety of business disciplines.  Here are some ideas to alleviate this situation and become a more customer-centric organization:

1.      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. 

2.      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.

3.      Share what your department does.  If you’re feeling misunderstood or not valued, perhaps you need to do a better job of sharing the important function your department plays in the overall customer experience. 

4.      Hold Lunch and Learns.  In support of number 3, invite others to learn about what your department does and the value you add to the experience.  Invite 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. 

5.      Executive Engagement.  Invite executives to travel with sales reps, listen in on customer calls or do side-by-sides with customer service representatives 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.

6.      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. 

7.      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. 

8.      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 NPS.  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!

9.      Relate remotely.  Despite the fact that many of us remain in a remote working environment, we need to find ways to duplicate what we had when we were all in the office together.  If you’re located in the same city, get together for coffee.  Hold virtual non-work related chats to get to know your colleagues.  Strive to be more personal in relating to one another virtually. 

10.  Find common ground.  What do you have in common with your colleagues either personally or professionally.  Are there events or happenings that you’ve shared together that strengthen your relationships with one another?  Enjoy one another through sharing and storytelling about things that matter most to you.    

Doing any one of these ideas can help improve the feeling that all employees create a better CX.  What you select may depend on where your organization is at in the customer experience journey.  Whatever you choose will make the “colleague experience” better!