Editorial
Think about customer engagement as an effect, not a cause. Work on employee engagement and customer engagement will follow.
But I don’t mean any sort of employee engagement. I mean getting employees involved in customer-centered activities and outcomes. In other words, start with the employee, not the customer. Customers will not naturally gravitate toward your employees. They wouldn’t — and shouldn’t — know how. Systematically place your employees, from the top of the organization to the bottom, into situations where they learn from, partner with and impact your customers. If you’re not deliberate about it, it simply won’t happen. But when it does, it’s magic.
The most practical way to drive customer engagement (and then customer experience, value, loyalty, and revenue) is through employees who truly understand your customers, who engage to improve customer experiences and outcomes, who drive customer-centered change and who inspire other employees to do the same.
4 Employee Engagement Objectives
It’s likely obvious that getting employees engaged in a customer-centered manner is a good thing, but let’s consider four specific objectives for doing so. Being mindful of these objectives will help you plot the course for engagement:
- Listen to a broad array of customers and learn from them about what matters and then apply that to your job. Why? Because an awareness of what customers value will enable your employees to contribute to that value within their role.
- Contribute to individual customers’ desired outcomes by resolving issues and creating value for (or with) them. Why? There is no better way to foster loyalty, and repeat business, than through customers achieving success.
- Drive changes to continuously improve and streamline your business processes and customer interactions. Why? You stay competitive and efficient by simplifying your operations and making it easier for customers to do business with you.
- Be inspired by customer successes and then inspire others in kind. Why? Customer success is the cornerstone of customer engagement. The point of engagement is helping customers to be successful in attaining their goals, and when customers are successful they are much more apt to buy more and recommend you.
Related Article: Use Customer Success to Activate Your Customers Into Influencers
Listen, Learn and Apply: Many Customers at a Time
This is the foundation of any customer engagement effort. For most businesses and for most strategic investments, creating scale at minimum expense is crucial. Investing in your customers is no different: listening, learning and applying customer insights in a way that efficiently engages many employees across many customers is key.
Start here, build momentum and then explore higher touch models for fewer customers or for one at a time. Customer insights will influence how your employees go about their job and ultimately improve productivity and employee satisfaction. And, naturally, the customer experience will improve as well.
Consider These Programs: Advisory Boards, User Groups, Workshops
- Customer councils and advisory boards. This is almost always my top recommendation for engaging employees in meaningful customer discussions. Having key development or engineering employees, for example, participate with a group of CIOs or HR executives will provide credibility and guidance for the customers and invaluable customer insights for the employees. Notably, the insights that your employees gain will spread to other employees like wildfire. Everybody loves great customer stories.
- User groups, customer communities and engagement platforms. This is the way to scale engagement well beyond what you can do with councils and boards — for your employees and for your customers. Usually, these groups are organized by product category, industry or geography, creating a clear path for employees to line up with the participating customers.
- Internal workshops on customer feedback themes. While this is one step removed from customers, it is very much all about customers and is a highly effective way to present customer feedback and engage employees in a dialog about what the feedback means and how to take action to address it. These sessions are usually organized functionally where, for example, a sales team will come together to review customer feedback on account management or sales interactions. The group reviews and challenges the feedback, collects more data as needed, and ultimately agrees on actions to be taken.
Related Article: 5 Reasons You Need a Customer Advisory Board
Contribute to Customer Outcomes: One Customer at a Time
For your higher value accounts (assessed by revenue, addressable spend, and customer brand value), a higher-touch model for engaging employees with customers is an essential element of an improved customer experience and value realization. Most organizations struggle with either insufficient resources to engage with customers or — in larger companies — properly orchestrating the resources that are available so the combined employee efforts are efficient and productive for the customer.
Consider These Programs: Account Management, Project Sponsorship
- Key account management. The combination of identifying employees as account team members (full or part-time) and establishing rules of engagement creates a powerful message for customers and gives employees the wherewithal to productively engage. Beyond specific accounts, a network of subject matter experts on tap for account teams to pull into account planning, opportunity management, or issue resolution can be a very powerful employee engagement mechanism.
- Executive and project sponsorship. The biggest accounts almost always appreciate easy access to your senior leaders or subject matter experts. These relationships give comfort and confidence to offset a big investment. And there is real value in having a trusted advisor or partner who has authority and expertise — and is viewed as an honest broker in identifying new opportunities or resolving thorny issues. Engaging your most senior employees as executive sponsors meets this need. Engaging others to sponsor specific projects can be equally impactful.
Change the Business Via Customer Engagement
Business transformation is a term that has been massively overused. That said, the best way to create sweeping change across your organization or company, however you want to label that, is to put customer engagement, expectations and experience in the center of it. In order to do this, you need to start with the employee and organize engagement in change efforts through them.
Consider These Programs: Internal CX, Customer Strategy Communities
- Internal CX or customer strategy community. One of my top recommendations for organizations working to improve employee and customer experiences is to launch an internal community across lines of business and functions to unify CX strategies, execution and measurement. Almost all employees value opportunities to affiliate with like-minded workers who want to share what they do well and where they need help. In my days as a chief customer officer, the internal CX community we ran had more than 100 people, many of whom met weekly on various topics with subgroups coming together regularly on specific change management projects, issues or customer situations. I had a full time, senior level community manager assigned to this, and it was one of the most effective investments we ever made. Community members ranged from top level executives to individual contributors.
- Ease of doing business. Predictably, the customer experience is the mirror image of the employee experience. When your employees feel like they are efficient, successful and collaborative in their jobs, odds are better than good that your customers will feel the same. Engaging your employees in examining and refining business processes will help you simplify overwrought workflows and enrich customer and employee experiences.
Related Article: Is It Time to Combine Customer Experience and Employee Experience Programs?
Inspire Commitment and Enthusiasm
Driving change in an organization requires vision, discipline, commitment and massive and sustained employee engagement. It also relies heavily on inspiration. Employees need to be inspired before they inspire others.
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Consider These Programs: Customer Marketing, Town Halls
- Internal customer marketing campaigns. Market to your employees as much as to customers. If employees are enthusiastic about the products and how we work with customers, then they will be our greatest advocates. And advocacy is all about inspiration. Internal marketing campaigns and materials are much like what you would see in traditional marketing campaigns and should include customer-centric messaging, videos, signage, meetings or town halls organized around specific customers or customer benefits, digital channels and employee calls to action.
- Executive Town Halls and content. Use the same marketing engine that you use for campaigns and events for your own executives to meet with employees to talk about their personal experiences with customers. Better yet, bring those customers into the dialog to share first-hand experiences and outcomes.
Getting Started With Customer-Centered Employee Engagement
As with all things customer experience and employee experience related, there is no one-size-fits-all formula to apply. But there are programs that can be executed with relative ease to get employees and customers alike engaged. A few critical success factors:
- Just get going — with any of the above, though councils and boards are usually the easiest and most impactful to launch, often setting a foundation for everything else.
- Modeling the right behaviors with your own team can help you gain traction elsewhere. There’s nothing better than hearing, “let’s do what they do.”
- Partnerships between experience leaders and peers in marketing, sales, HR, engineering and operations are critical. Employee engagement is tough without cross-functional buy-in and at least some top-down endorsement.
- Bring both data and stories to the table. Customer anecdotes that give color to the data from a voice of the customer program foster a groundswell of enthusiasm and commitment.
Customer-centered employee engagement can be a true competitive differentiator. A customer strategy disconnected from your employee experience is nonsensical.
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