Editorial
The Gist
- Great CX empowers employees. Employees feel energized with autonomy to adapt to customer needs.
- Enablement enhances experience. Tools, training and data prepare employees for success in their roles.
- Inspiration boosts engagement. Employees find meaning in their work by impacting customers' lives.
We often talk about the importance of providing a great experience for employees so that they can deliver a great experience for customers. And it’s true! Employees are integral to customer experience delivery, responsible for some of the most important, and memorable, parts of any experience. You want them to feel engaged and to be focused on their work.
But I don’t think the causation flows only in one direction, from great employee experience to great customer experience. In fact, it’s pretty clear that the influence flows in both directions.
Working for a company committed to delivering great customer experiences creates a better employee experience too. How so?
Three ways:
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Inspiration: Finding purpose from work worth doing — making customers happy by giving them a great experience.
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Enablement: Having the tools, training and data to deliver a great experience makes employees feel looked after because they are prepared and equipped to be successful in their roles.
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Empowerment: Employees who are tasked with delivering great customer experiences must be granted autonomy to adapt to customer needs in the moment. Autonomy is energizing.
Let’s look at each of these in turn.
Inspire Employees by Committing to Great CX and EX
Humans want to find meaning in their work. This is true for the professions you think of — doctors, nurses, firefighters, teachers — and also for professions you might not suspect — cashiers, sandwich makers, janitors. How do employees find meaning in jobs? One way is that they connect with the impact they make in other peoples’ lives: their colleagues and their customers.
How Do You Inspire Employees With CX?
Two steps to get started:
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Solicit employee feedback. Make it easy for employees to tell you what they’re seeing in customer experience delivery. If they’re customer-facing, what are they hearing from customers? What else do they need to deliver a good customer experience? If they’re behind the scenes, what are they hearing from their colleagues in terms of how they can best support customer-facing employees in delivering experiences to customers? The mere step of asking will demonstrate to employees that you are including them in the CX and EX transformation.
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Make explicit what each employee should do to contribute to CX delivery. As Brené Brown says, “Clear is kind.” When employees know which activities and behaviors they perform in their jobs that contribute to experience delivery, they have the clarity they need to know they’re playing their part in an organization committed to great CX and EX.
Related Article: Is It Time to Make CX and EX 'One Experience'?
Enable Employees to Deliver Your Intended Experience
For companies that want to deliver a great customer experience, they’ll need their employees to be able to meet the challenge. For the human-powered parts of the experience, employees will need to be trained and equipped with data and tools to best know and serve customers. Here again, we find that delivering a great customer experience gives employees something that they crave: the conditions they need to do their jobs, and do them well.
How should you enable employees to deliver a great customer experience? Two enablement steps:
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Train employees in role-appropriate, customer-centric behaviors. When CX training is role-specific, it enables employees to perform their jobs while simultaneously contributing to great CX. This specific training applies for both customer-facing and behind-the-scenes employees. My favorite example came from Crowe, an accounting consultancy. They used customer feedback to identify customer-centric employee behaviors that led to great CX outcomes. And then they asked those customer-facing employees to highlight the behaviors from their behind-the-scenes colleagues that had contributed to the best CX and EX outcomes. In this way, they had specific behaviors for training with all employees, validated by the knowledge that the behaviors had led to happy customers in the past.
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Ensure technology and data make it easier for employees to serve customers. Do employees have information about customers to tailor their experience? Do they have easy access to functionality to address customer requests, or to connect with colleagues who may be able to help? An audit of the technology and data available to your employees will give you a strong starting point for gauging if employees are enabled, or not.
Empower Employees to Adapt and Respond to Customers
Finally, to ensure that employees can adapt to complex and unexpected customer questions or needs, they’ll need autonomy to react and respond appropriately. Empowered employees take care of customers. And being empowered feels good.
How should you empower employees to deliver great customer experiences? Two ways:
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Grant them decision-making authority. “$2,000 to make it right or delight.” You probably already know that I’m highlighting the employee empowerment program from the Ritz-Carlton hotel chain. It’s famous, and rightly so. Ritz-Carlton demonstrates what radical empowerment looks like, allowing employees to spend up to $2,000 per guest, per day without having to get approval. There are famous stories of employees going to great lengths. But in reality the average intervention is small. Why? Because employees know they can act, and they almost always address issues early, before fixing them requires a big outlay.
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Revise rules and processes that present barriers to delivering great experiences. Employees want to know that they are not alone when it comes to delivering great customer experiences. This is where changes to policies that discourage customer-centricity are valuable. A few years back, Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) found that its Average Handle Time (AHT) metric in its call-centers was leading to agents rushing off the phone with customers, rather than fully answering their questions. They deemphasized AHT, and despite the added costs from longer call-times, they saw huge ROI from increased customer retention.
All of the elements required to put employees in a position where they can deliver great customer experiences are the elements required for a great employee experience. When employees are inspired, enabled and empowered, they are more likely to stay at their companies, recommend their companies as places to work, and, most crucially, report that their companies deliver a great customer experience. Remember, great CX and EX are linked.
And so while it’s true that employee experience quality matters for customer experience quality, the reverse is also true.
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