"The most important challenge companies face is keeping their employees motivated. This is part of the employee experience which is fundamental in customer-centric culture. The employee experience is a key challenge nowadays because employees are going through many life difficulties. Above all, they are vigilant in caring for their health and their families. Motivation is a key challenge," says Aleyda Vargas de Aviles, Senior Advisor Business Operations, Empresa, in Clootrack's report with 102 CX experts.
Moreover, the report suggests that the inability or unwillingness to create compelling experiences for employees is a big challenge they face while delivering customer experience.
7 Best Employee Experience Practices to Ingrain CX Values
Brands with a strong focus on providing excellent customer service consistently outperform the competition and enjoy devoted followings. To exceed customer expectations, you must integrate a customer-centric mindset into every part of your business.
1. Understand What Motivates Your Frontline Teams
More than two-thirds of customer loyalty is driven by CX, which is more than brand and price. Additionally, customer service representatives are constantly at the forefront of fostering and sustaining brand loyalty.
Customer satisfaction will be greatly influenced by their performance and the customer service level. Customers will stop buying from a brand 46% of the time if the employees lack knowledge. Therefore, your company needs to understand how to empower and inspire its employees, especially the frontline teams, to provide value to customers.
Since each team member will be unique, you should find out what motivates them, what they hope the company will do to inspire them, and what rewards they need to feel motivated at work.
- Conduct employee surveys - One of the finest ways to comprehend the individual motivations of each customer service team member is to conduct employee surveys.
- Engage with your frontline personnel frequently. Your team can be motivated by regular interactions in which you listen to their concerns and are prepared to act on them.
- For example, you can carry out monthly employee surveys and gain insights into whether and how they interacted with customers, what were the customers most excited about, or note their suggestions.
2. Involve Employees to Craft Your CX Goals
Many businesses use business-centric KPIs to measure performance to set and anchor goals. It is something leaders can grasp and understand. It has a lot of weight for them as they must deliver according to it.
Instead, consider the same objective from the perspective of a typical employee. For that, you can:
- Co-pilot with your employees will help you create the finest customer experience.
- Establish procedures and systems that enable employees to act empathetically and with the interests of consumers in mind by utilizing information from the front lines.
- For example, you can establish a reward-based optional procedure where the best employee inputs about CX strategies get recognized.
3. Create Human-Centric Business Goals
Leaders would do well to reframe less accessible business-centric KPIs from the perspective of customer performance indicators focusing on people to close the gap (CPIs). CPIs, instead of KPIs, are more concerned with the social, emotional, and practical objectives that every person aspires to in life.
Therefore, CPIs are engaging and intuitive concerning how they help the customer and how they fit into the equation of serving both the customer and the business, independent of an employee's position, experience, expertise, or history.
- For instance, using this paradigm, you can state:
“The company needs to assist its customers to feel a higher sense of accomplishment.”
Instead of:
“The company has to boost A or B measures."
- Customers and employees on both sides of the equation benefit greatly from genuinely human-centric KPIs.
4. Ensure Key Executives Are in Resonance With CX Goals
Executive motivation differs from employee motivation in essential ways. Executives frequently understand how their decisions affect top-line corporate results and the influence they have.
However, the connection between personnel and business success is a little hazier. However, they model their behavior and method of operation after successful managers and coworkers. They will obey leaders who genuinely put their words into action.
Therefore, make sure they are aware of your CX objectives. You can:
- Ensure your leadership is cognizant of and empathetic to the human-centric objectives you depend on for an effective CX.
- Go beyond customer satisfaction ratings and utilize this knowledge to connect your mission, goals, and vision with those of your customers.
- Make sure to convey it and that the employees understand it. For example, you can indulge in team discussions where the monthly CX goals are brainstormed and further strategized.
5. Educate and Train Your Employees
"Despite organizations 'talking' about the customer experience more and more over the last ten years, many still struggle to separate what they DO from what the customer EXPERIENCES. This represents the difference between organizational processes and the customer journey. Changing the mindset from thinking and acting in the interests of the business to thinking and acting in the customer's interests is easier said than done!! To become sustainably customer-centric, all organizations need to give their employees the time and ability to genuinely 'put themselves in the customers' shoes' so that they can think beyond the task," says Ian Golding, CEO and Founder of Customer Experience Consultancy, as per the Clootrack report.
If a brand can offer satisfied customers throughout the customer journey, 65% of respondents would stick with it over time. Employees should receive training on empathizing with consumers and create a purposeful understanding of their role in the larger scheme of things. Replicating consumer experiences and having employees immerse themselves in these experiences are two ways businesses might achieve this.
- Implement procedures that will allow you to monitor how your services or products are used and perceived.
- For example, each quarter, you can send an employee to go through the entire customer experience/journey to confirm that best practices and requirements for quality assurance are being satisfied.
- Be responsive to consumer feedback and collaborate with the customer to address any problems they may have encountered on their own.
Each employee must be able to explain how they add value to the customer experience. Teams are dynamic, productive, and engaged in producing output that aligns with CX goals when values are ingrained into the decision-making process regularly.
6. Modify Your HR Processes
Integrating CX practices with HR procedures is the most effective strategy to inspire staff members to model the organization's CX values. You can take the following measures to craft your HR processes accordingly.
- To aid consumer engagement, establish a new department that combines the employee and customer experience teams.
- Create a division specifically for performance management, promotion procedures, and succession planning.
- Talk about the success and the company's adherence to its basic values.
- Encourage employees to consistently uphold the CX values and vision in everything they do.
- Make customized reward programs linked to excellent customer results.
- Include CX principles in performance evaluations. Companies should evaluate employees based on how well they reach their performance goals as well as what they really do.
When goals are attained, reward exceptional employee performance. When a business can connect customer achievements to financial results, reward systems can alter operational systems and employee behaviors.
7. Empower Employees With Insights and Data-Driven Evidence
"You can't manage what you don't measure." Customer centricity is also subject to this maxim.
Organizations should be careful to develop and track the relationship between culture and customer impact because managers will be motivated and equipped to foster a customer-centric culture if they know whether and how it affects results.
Every employee needs to comprehend the organization's consumers to develop a customer-centric mindset. Do not expect other departments to concentrate on their tasks while storing consumer understanding in the sales and marketing units.
- Create procedures that remove internal constraints so that top-down and bottom-up communication about customers is seamless.
- Create listening areas where employees can gather to hear customer calls.
- For example, provide an update on the company's customer experience delivery at each all-employee meeting.
The Key Takeaways
Positive customer outcomes depend on a base of engaged employees.
Employees will feel more empowered, engaged, and connected to delivering value for consumers as a result of taking the time to complete the steps mentioned above, which will ultimately benefit the bottom line of the business.
When customer experience is completed effectively, it serves as a driving force for employees to perform well and a reward for a well-done job. The customers and other stakeholders profit immensely from this.
The business must be clear about its fundamental values and how to fit with the business for employees to be able to model them.
Senior leaders must also walk the talk. If not, employees won't just refuse to follow the aims but will also get a wrong opinion of the business.
Give the team a framework based on data, evidence, and values. With this knowledge, leadership can consistently build better procedures and programs to surpass expectations by using information from the front lines.
Customer experiences with an organization are only as good as employee experiences!
Also Read: 5 Brilliant Customer Experience Lessons Brands Can Learn From 102 CX Experts