Many of the senior executives and business leaders I speak with are making the customer experience a major priority. It is no longer good enough to simply satisfy your customer’s needs, particularly in the wake of The Great Recession. To be truly competitive, companies are increasingly analyzing each step along the customer journey – and great companies are putting the pieces of that journey together in ways that enable them to:
Be proactive in anticipating customer needs
Identify themes, or trends, which yield insight into strategic opportunities
Correct frustrations and pain points
Create efficiencies to streamline customer interactions
This process of examining your business through the customer’s lens is an excellent practice, and one we regularly guide our clients through at entreQuest. Yet, far too often the dialogue surrounding customer experience misses a critical foundational piece – the employee experience. For example, the GoogleTrends data below shows employee engagement is not keeping pace with the search interest customer experience is generating.
Howard Schultz, the CEO of Starbucks, is one of the pioneers of customer experience who gets it. In his book, Onward, Shultz writes,"[Employees] are the true ambassadors of our brand, the real merchants of romance and theater, and as such the primary catalysts for delighting customers." Schultz’s insight that customers are not just buying coffee – they are buying an experience that is shaped by its employees, or “partners” – led him to focus on Starbucks’ employees as a foundational element of the organizational revitalization he led when he returned as CEO in January 2008. See Inside Starbucks’s $35 million mission to make brand evangelists of its front-line workers, to learn more about some of the tactics that Schultz deployed to revitalize the Starbucks experience, starting with a revitalization of its employee experience.
Why is it important to focus on transformational relationships with your employees as a strategy for remarkable customer, or client, experience? There are many reasons; I will offer three:
• Model the Way. You are teaching your employees how to behave. Steven Covey believed you should “always treat your employees exactly as you would want them to treat your best customers.”
• Generate Goodwill & Passion. If you go above and beyond for your employees, they will transfer the goodwill you have generated with them by going above and beyond for your customers. Kouzes and Posner make this point in their business classic The Leadership Challenge, “When leadership is a relationship founded on trust and confidence, people take risks, make changes, keep organizations and movements alive. Through that relationship, leaders turn their constituents into leaders themselves.”
• Increase Retention. When business leaders think about turnover costs, the focus is typically on the cost to replace and train a new employee. What about the cost to the customer experience? What happens to your experience at Starbucks if your favorite barista leaves – the one who knows how to spell your name (correctly) and always asks how your dog is doing? What happens when the lines increase because the new employee is training and needs more time to complete the same tasks? You might decide to leave and go to another store with a shorter line and more efficient staff. Or to start making coffee at home. Employee retention is a significant lever you can pull as a means of impacting your customer experience.
The importance of employee engagement (or experience) to the customer experience is often missed; yet, it is a critical foundational element underlying each of the interactions your customers have with your business. If your aim is to do it effectively, you really can’t have one without the other. For more insights on the employee and client experience pick up a copy of Grow Regardless; there is an entire chapter of the book dedicated to the importance of the employee experience, and how you can build a remarkable one for yourself.
