In the last two weeks I have had the chance to attend our annual Net Promoter Conference in London, work directly with several of our clients on their programs, and attend the Forrester Research conference on Customer Experience currently being held in New York. In all of these scenarios, the key topic of discussion is how to truly engage the organization in delivering a superior customer experience. How do you get employees on the Net Promoter/customer experience bus?
It’s clear this is the holy grail of achieving results through customer experience/Net Promoter programs. And, yet I find bifurcating factors that impact an organization’s effectiveness.
Some companies subscribe to the Executive Commitment + Employee Compensation = Magic Happens Here formula. While this may work in some cultures, I think this is the hard road to success, full of lions, tigers and bears (oh my!). In my work with clients, I see the outcome of this approach. Employees are skeptical of the longevity of the commitment, don’t understand their role and how they can help improve the customer experience, and in general, these organizations miss the opportunity to engage the entire organization in driving change.
On the other hand, there are organizations that engage their employees completely in the process, build robust communication and training strategies to support them, and decompose their Net Promoter Score into smaller parts to understand the root cause. They assign goals that are meaningful, such as communication of the status of outstanding trouble tickets, which in turn improves the customer’s satisfaction with the service experience, and ultimately drives improvements in NPS.
Here is a link to the blogs written at the Net Promoter Conference and the session I led, “Pride or Money? Motivating Employees to Delight the Customer.” We showcase case studies from Life Financial (Russian Bank), Verizon Business, and Experian QAS.
Today I captured these notes from the Forrester panel on Customer
Experience trends. The stories have a common theme – focus on education, change management and training to get your employees to understand their role in improving the customer experience, which results in business growth.
USAA (a Net Promoter leader at 81% NPS!)
- Culture trumps strategy.
- Trust your customers. USAA enabled mobile deposits allowing members to make copies of their checks on their mobile device and send in for deposit.
- Reconfigured the organization around a relationship model with 60% of their resources aligned around the customers vs. product approach.
- Dealing with emerging channels of customer interaction (Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, iPhones, iPad). Deconstruct your web property to distribute content vs. creating a destination site.
- Developed journey map from the outside in, understanding the experience from the customer‘s point of view.
- Trained over 400 senior leaders on the branded customer experience, 86% of which report making different decisions after the training.
- Shift from product to customer experience view is longer lasting than throwing product out there which competition
- Created a branded customer experience certification that allows products and processes to be “certified” as delivering on the brand.
- Grassroots efforts from the “gut” of the organization. Hand picked champions throughout the business that were outspoken and challenged the norm.
- Develop products from the customer backwards. Innovation with a focus on the customer experience. Created “start over” which allows you to come in during the middle of a program and restart the program to the beginning even if you weren’t recording.
Sorry to report – there is no magic. Building organizational pride is a transformational journey that requires continuous effort. Companies like USAA that achieve top performance maintain focus, and their customer experience leader reports he doesn’t sleep at night worrying about how to continue to improve and maintain high levels of customer loyalty.
The journey continues…
