Category: Engagement

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Engagement Marketing

National Employee’s Day (Did you miss it, too?)

Did you know March 12th was National Employee’s Day?

It was a surprise to me (especially given my internal marketing, “employees-first” approach). I just learned about it recently (more on that later), and found very little on the web when I researched it. Although I did discover links to National Employee Health & Fitness Day, National Employee Benefits Day, and the National Association for Employee Recognition blog.

When I asked around, I heard some interesting reactions ranging from “I thought that’s what Labor Day is all about” to “Everyday is Employees’ Day – they get paid to come to work, don’t they?” My question is: do employees really need a special day set aside for recognition? I hate to think that’s the only time when a company acknowledges its people.

If anyone has more info on National Employee’s Day, please let me know.

P.S. So where did I first hear about this special day? It was mentioned in the daily newsletter for staff & guests of Glenora Inn, where my husband & I stayed recently. (It’s our favorite getaway place in the beautiful Finger Lakes.) Glenora management was treating its staff in observance of National Employee’s Day, one of many employee recognition efforts they engage in. I already know first-hand the incredible service & hospitality provided by Glenora staff (sigh) … guess I’ll just have to go back to learn more about their internal marketing.

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Engagement Marketing

My Book & the Perfect Title

Finally! I found a title for my internal marketing book as it nears publication.

Why the excitement? Because I’ve been wrestling with the title for quite a while. (I had the book’s concept in place long before the title.)

Any business professional who’s written a book about her/his life’s work knows the mixed blessing involved in such an endeavor. If business is good, you don’t have time to write. It’s much easier to focus on the book when business is slow, which is also when you need to spend time filling the project pipeline.

Truth is I’ve been able to balance my time between serving clients and writing the book. Much of my procrastination is due to my search for the “perfect title.” I struggled with it while minding the sage advice of several mentors:

  • don’t use “internal marketing” in the title since it’s not a universally recognized concept
  • find a clever, sexy title that will help sell the book
  • forget clever … just keep it simple so people know what the book is about.

In the meantime, I worked on developing and expanding meaningful content while trying out various “working” titles on my clients, colleagues, mentors, friends and family (with my husband’s “Just finish the damn book already!” echoing in my ear).

Here it is (drum roll) … my book on internal marketing & communications, to be released this year by WME Books is: Taking Care of the People Who Matter Most: A Guide to Employee-Customer Care.

It captures the essence of internal marketing: taking care of employees so they can take care of customers. Both employees and customers matter to organizations, and both need attention. Employees are people, too; yet they’re sometimes treated poorly in the workplace. Ditto for consumers in the marketplace.

So I finally have a working title that I love (thanks to all who’ve put up with me as I cleared that hurdle), and my manuscript is being edited. Now what?

As I’m learning from my publisher, Yvonne DiVita, my book journey is only beginning. Stay tuned …

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Engagement Marketing

A Must Read: “Firms of Endearment”

I predict a business best seller for a book that’s being released this month: Firms of Endearment: How World-Class Companies Profit from Passion and Purpose. It’s about how successful companies focus on ALL their stakeholders, not just shareholders. [2014 Update: This book is now in its second edition.]

Given my internal marketing bias, I’m thrilled with any book that encourages companies to pay more attention to their employees. But Firms of Endearment goes even further as it advocates appropriate attention to all of a firm’s stakeholders: its customers, employees, partners/suppliers, investors, and the community-at-large/society. I also love the examples of how these companies do this profitably in spite of Wall Street’s short-term focus.

The research process used to identify “Firms of Endearment” (FoE) was opposite of the Good to Great approach. Instead of starting with financial performance and working backwards to find common corporate practices as with “Good to Great” companies, FoE authors began by identifying companies that people love. These companies were then screened for their performance in serving each stakeholder constituency, followed by an investor analysis on the publicly-traded companies.

The book explores the answer to the question:

“How is it that these companies can be so generous to everyone who costs them money (customers, employees, suppliers, communities) and still deliver superior (some would say spectacular) returns to investors?”

I’m adding the book to my “recommended reading” list that I handout in my training workshops and, of course, my “Good Reads” blog roll.

Happy reading!

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Customer service Engagement Marketing

Employees & the Customer Experience: A Question of Motivation

Here’s the last post in my series about Maritz‘s approach to the Customer Experience.

Maritz recognizes the importance of the customer experience as a critical brand differentiator: “ … companies must take a more thorough, local, meaningful, and integrated approach to managing the people who are in regular contact with their customers.”

One point I would add is it’s important to ensure the process also includes non-contact staff; i.e., don’t forget the behind-the-scenes folks and the role they play in taking care of their fellow employees (aka “internal customers”).

However, there’s one excerpt from Maritz’s white paper that I question, and I wanted to bring it to your attention. “Maritz defines ‘the customer experience management process’ as creating greater value for customers by better understanding drivers within the experience, enabling the people who touch customers to act differently, and motivating them to care.” [emphasis is mine]

There’s something about those last few words … I know we can motivate employees to deliver a good customer experience, deliver on the brand promise, etc., but can we really motivate them to care? I keep thinking of the advice from the hospitality industry: hire people for attitude (i.e., those who genuinely like working with and helping people) and train them on the skill set you need.

Maybe I’m just having an issue with semantics here. Let me know what you think.

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Customer service Engagement Marketing

Employees & the Customer Experience: What Companies Can Do

As promised in my last post, here are the findings of Maritz’s 2006 Customer Experience study:

  • Almost half of all customers (43%) who defect do so because of service
  • 77% of these customer blame their leaving on employee attitude
  • 83% of these customers tell someone else.

Maritz’s white paper, “Delight or Defection: The Pivotal Role of People Inside the Customer Experience,” also outlines its approach on how companies can positively impact employee behavior:

  • Better (deeper) measurement of the customer experience:
  • Localized, “grass-roots” intervention (more on this shortly)
  • Meaningful motivation
  • Integrated & aligned action.

I especially like Maritz’s combination top-down & bottom-up strategy to enabling and driving change at the local level: share research results with employees … obtain their input on improving the customer experience … and facilitate action plans based on the research & particulars of the organization at that locale. According to Maritz, “Co-development of learning and action plans with front-line staff generates relevancy, greater participation, and employee buy-in.”

More on Maritz’s approach in my next post …

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Customer service Engagement

Employees & the Customer Experience: Employee Engagement Isn’t Enough

That’s the takeaway I got from D. Randall Brandt, VP of Customer Experience & Loyalty, Maritz Research in his presentation at AMA’s MPlanet

Now that I have your attention, let me put his message in context. Brandt was talking about employee engagement as a variable in research on the customer experience. Most firms measure engagement by asking “what’s it like to work here?” That’s important, but it’s not enough. What’s missing are questions about the employees’ customer orientation; i.e,, how they’re enabled or inhibited in providing service quality.

Effective measurement of the customer experience needs to consider both employee satisfaction AND the employees’ ability to deliver a positive customer experience via customer-focus, readiness & empowerment.

I’ll have more on Maritz’s latest research on employees & the customer experience in my next post.

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Engagement Marketing

Shhh! Check out the “Quiet Manager”

It’s good to be reminded that not all great leaders are of celebrity-caliber.

That’s one of the key messages in Managing Quietly by thought leader and academic Henry Mintzberg, who is critical of the hero worship stimulated by the media for turnaround executives. According to Mintzberg:

“To ‘turn around’ is to end up facing the same way … Might not the white knight of management be the black hole of organizations?  What good is the great leader if everything collapses when he or she leaves?”

Instead, he favors the “quiet managers” who:

  • Inspire rather than empower their people by creating a culture with “conditions that foster openness and release energy” so that “empowerment is taken for granted.”
  • Care for their organizations by spending more time “preventing problems than fixing them, because they know enough to know when and how to intervene.”
  • Infuse change so that it “seeps in slowly, steadily, profoundly” instead of dramatically so “everyone takes responsibility for making sure that serious changes take hold.”

The power of listening

What I found particularly refreshing is the quiet manager’s appreciation & respect for an organization’s institutional and collective memory. Mintzberg writes:

“Show me a chief executive who ignores yesterday, who favors the new outsider over the experienced insider, the quick fix over steady progress, and I’ll show you a chief executive who is destroying an organization.”

His description calls up one of my favorite quotes from entrepreneur Andrew Filipowski:

“The insiders of an organization understand the stupidity of its traditions better than the outsiders.”

Quiet leaders are in touch with what’s going in their organizations and do not treat their people as “detachable ‘human resources.'”  A manager who respects and listens to employees?  That’s the understated mark of a true leader.

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Engagement Marketing

Leonard L. Berry – Distinguished Marketing Educator & Mentor

Catching up on my Marketing News, I was excited to find the announcement of Dr. Leonard Berry being named the recipient of the 2007 AMA/Irwin/McGraw-Hill Distinguished Marketing Educator Award. It’s the highest honor a marketing educator can receive based on his/her contributions to marketing education and the marketing discipline.

I’ve been privileged to learn so much from this man even though I never had him in a classroom. Len is one of my mentors from whom I’ve learned a lot about services marketing, service quality, leadership, and of course, internal marketing. In his classic 1991 book, Marketing Services, Len recognized employees as “the most powerful medium for conveying the brand to customers.”

A pioneer in the field of bank marketing (where I began my career) and service quality research (“When we improve quality of service, we improve quality of daily living … “), Len has been both generous and gracious in sharing his knowledge and work. His advice and support were also critical in helping me make the decision to launch Quality Service Marketing nearly 20 years ago.

Congratulations, Len, on a well-deserved honor. And thanks for all you’ve done for the marketing field, for the services industry, and for your students, including me.

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Customer service Engagement Marketing

A Guide to Losing Customers for All Seasons

As part of the holiday season, you hear plenty of customer service horror stories – as well as some positive retail experiences. However, the bad experience I mentioned in my last post occurred before the shopping rush.

As did Olivier Blanchard’s experiences, which he wrote about in his great post: How to Lose Customers in Ten Simple Steps. Of particular note in his formula for alienating customers is this step: “Treat your employees badly.”

Many consumers have zero tolerance for managers who demean employees in front of them. The situation is not only embarrassing for those involved but can have negative repercussions on both employee and customer satisfaction & retention.

Good help is not only hard to find, it’s hard to keep!

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Engagement Marketing

Why Employees Resist Marketing: What to Do About It

As discussed in my last post, there’s no getting around the reality that all employees are marketers in the sense that they all impact the brand.

The challenge for marketers involves managing this “expanded” marketing staff when you have no authority over them. Specifically, how do you overcome resistance to marketing when, in truth, it creates extra work for employees? Here’s what I recommend.

Getting ready

Before launching any marketing initiative, you need to:

  • share the rationale behind your marketing programs, including communicating what you’re trying to do & why; i.e., no sugar-coating or BS allowed
  • align marketing efforts with the big strategic picture to send the message “we’re all in this together”
  • get employee input … and be sensitive & responsive to how their work will be affected by marketing
  • provide the appropriate training (and perhaps incentives) so staff can effectively support marketing’s efforts.

While underway

Once your marketing program is implemented, you can’t just walk away. As part of your monitoring efforts:

  • stay in touch with what employees need to keep the momentum going
  • share the program’s success and any interim fine-tuning that needs to be done (and why)
  • recognize & reinforce employee support of the program.

And when all is said and done

  • share the final results, including what worked & why … what didn’t work & why … (another reason to stay in touch with employees, as previously mentioned)
  • solicit employee feedback on ways to improve future initiatives
  • acknowledge employee efforts and their collective contribution to serving customers in support of corporate strategy, not just marketing.

It’s all about marketing to non-marketing employees – another critical aspect of internal marketing.