Wondering what’s going on in the world of customer service, customer experience (CX) and employee engagement? The Upland Rant & Rave team were excited to spend the day discussing this very topic when we attended the annual Institute of Customer Service conference last week. As well as exhibiting at the conference, we celebrated some great customer service excellence when Richard Davey, our Head of Customer Success, presented the ‘Rant & Rave Best Customer Satisfaction Strategy Award’ to Kia Motors (UK).
To top it all off, we provided a live feedback solution for all attendees on the ground, using our SMS Listening Posts to ensure real-time feedback from delegates could be responded to promptly.
The hot topic of conversation
But what about the insight on the ground? Interestingly, there was one topic of conversation that came up time and time again – the importance of linking up CX and employee experience (EX), and how exactly you can bring the two together. Historically, these two arenas have been kept somewhat separate, with little consideration for the fact that they’re actually inextricably linked. Nowadays, CX and EX are the new hot couple, and it’s easy to see why.
Happy staff means happy customers, and you’ll struggle to deliver a great experience and meet customer needs if your frontline agents aren’t engaged. Customer engagement has to start with employee engagement. Richard Branson said it best: ‘Clients do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of the employees, they will take care of the clients.’
Fortunately, this doesn’t have to make your CX and EX strategies more complicated, because the tactics at play are fairly similar. CX (and customer retention) is all about great service, smooth communication, gathering feedback and acting on it efficiently to show customers that you’re listening to what they’re saying. While EX is a case of building a great environment, keeping communications open, collecting feedback from across the business, and then proving that you’re taking it on board.
have been facilitating personalized customer experiences for over 15 years. Through their enterprise grade, cloud-based platform, it brings together email, marketing automation, customer data and, smarter customer and employee engagement on a truly multi-channel level, deep process automation and a continuous cycle of analytics and insight to continually drive a business forward successfully
Check out our tips for linking up CX and EX
Still feeling unsure as to how to go about it? If you’re looking for more information, check out our handy infographic, which provides seven top tips for bringing CX and EX together. To get you started, here’s numbers one to three.
1. Turn ‘top down’ on its head, and start treating your frontline agents like they’re the top management of your company. They’re the ones who drive sales, drive customer goodwill, and truly create change, after all.
2. See beyond the data by constantly going out and asking colleagues how they feel and what changes should be made.
3. Create continuous engagement by immersing every department of the business in a customer-centric culture.
Ready for more? Download the rest of the infographic here.
