Help for Improving the Customer and Employee Experience
When it comes to managing the customer experience in corporate America, it’s a sad state of affairs. That’s the news from the Temkin Group’s research based on four core customer experience competencies:
- “Purposeful Leadership” – consistently communicating and modeling company values and customer-focused strategies
- “Compelling Brand Values” – translating how brand attributes can be applied in customer interactions
- “Employee Engagement” – gaining employee buy-in to company values and goals
- “Customer Connections” – using customer insight in operations and decision-making.
[Note: For more information, check out Temkin’s Customer Experience Competency Model assessment.]
I first read about this research in a MarketCulture blog post, and two selected stats caught my attention:
- “95% [of the respondents] want to improve profitability, but only 43% want to improve the work environment for employees.”
- The highest scoring competency was “Senior executives regularly communicate that customer experience is one of the company’s key strategies.” Yet, “Marketing does as much brand marketing inside the company as it does outside the company” was the lowest scoring competency.
Seriously, how can you focus on the customer experience and the bottom line if you don’t first focus on the employee experience? Especially since it’s the employees who deliver the brand!
For those interested in getting it right, consider attending this fall’s Internal Branding & Internal Marketing: Strategic Integration for Market Leadership, an AMA Spotlight Forum. Debra Semans and I will be co-presenting this special one-day event November 11th in San Francisco. Debra will share her expertise in internal branding, and I’ll share mine in internal marketing … and we’ll help you put both approaches together to enhance your customers’ AND your employees’ experience.
Perhaps some of the respondents in the survey should patronize their own businesses to get an idea of how poor some of the customer/employee experiences are out there. It seems like engaging in internal marketing would be an obvious way to increase an organization’s profitability.
Wow, there is someone out there that believes it starts with you. Either you as the business owner, you the customer service rep or you the consumer. You take what you know and what you experience to the table. Bad service means no repeat business, so why was the service bad? Was the employee not being treated properly? If this is the case then again, no repeat business. Why frequent a business with bad practices internally when those practices again carry on to the service proved which results in, you got it, no repeat business due to bad experiences all around. Unhappy employees will leave which means there is no one to deal with the customer. It is a very ugly and vicious cycle that if preempted before the issue starts makes for a better work environment, happier employees that are more productive and therefore provide better service and products.