In part one of this article discussed how the level of connectedness between your employees and customers plays a growing role in your organization’s customer-retention success. Today we examine some employee-centric client strategy.
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In strengthening this undeniable link, experts say several practices stand out. To cultivate your own customer-employee connection, review the following tactics:
Sharing the Love
Make sure the mission resonates with both groups. Take a look at your organization’s mission statement. Does it inspire or fall flat? Refine or restate it if some core strength related to employees or customers is missing. After all, your mission statement must be an authentic reflection of your intentions. If it’s not, employees will be the first to know—followed by your customers as a close second.
At Whole Foods Market, for example, a set of eight core values drive its mission statement. The second of these is “We satisfy, delight and nourish our customers,” and the third is “We support team member excellence and satisfaction.”
Only after those does the company talk about increasing profits, growth, and shareholder value.
Encourage employees to tell their story. To strengthen the bond between employees and customers, get staff interested in identifying their particular and personal “line of sight”—that is, how their own role ultimately affects the customer experience and why they’re good at what they do.
For a support center rep, that story might be quickly diagnosing a problem and accurately offering a solution—helped by the fact that he’s a good listener. For a manager of a legal team, the story might explore how she can create simpler purchase contracts and customer-friendly terms and conditions—made possible by the fact that she’s a talented researcher who efficiently examines all the angles.
Do a regular integrity checkup. Periodically ask yourself these questions to gauge your own level of customer care integrity. How strongly do you agree or disagree with the following statements:
- We treat our front line as the heroes of our business and do whatever is needed to support them.
- We are clear about who our core customers are, and their loyalty gives us a competitive advantage.
- The voices of the customer and our employees are fully represented in all important decisions.
Find the customer-experience sweet spots. You know your customer sweet spot: that target group that your company can serve better than anyone else can. But what about identifying your employee-customer sweet spots in terms of the kinds of interactions that can make all the difference?
Example: A major media company used to encourage call center staff to keep calls as short as possible. Now the emphasis has shifted to resolving calls the first time around, even if that takes extra time to do.
The idea is to identify the essential contact points along the way, where a better experience dovetails with better economics—in this case, removing potential error and waste from operational processes while simultaneously giving customers a better experience.