Getting everyone in your company to believe Customer Experience is part of their job isn't always easy. While some people understand what you want to achieve for customers straight away, others will take a bit of persuasion.
They might realise Customer Experience is important, but just not see how it fits in with their job roles and responsibilities or, unfortunately, they might just not see it as being a priority for them at all.
So, as a Customer Experience professional, what can you do about it? How can you get your people on board and have them pick up the Customer Experience mantle?
Hire people who buy into your customer-obsessed approach
As new people join the business, you’ll find they can strengthen or weaken your promise to customers. Your brand is only as strong as the weakest person working for it.
Hiring the wrong person can end up costing more than money. An article in Forbes cites 'morale and productivity impacts ahead of monetary costs'. It makes sense, if someone on the team isn't pulling their weight, others have to pick up the slack. This can lead even the most motivated and engaged employees feeling tired and fed up.
When it comes to Customer Experience, if someone doesn't buy into your approach, it can mean they're delivering a less than stellar service to the customer. Even candidates with all the right qualifications and experience can make bad hires. It doesn't mean they couldn't do the job; they just wouldn't be the right fit for your customers.
Share customer insights with employees
Support employees by sharing customer insights with them. For Customer Experience sceptics, this can be a powerful approach because it gives life to your customers within the organisation and can help employees to realise why you're so customer focused.
Collect using free flow verbatim from customers so that you can see the reason behind their scores. Then look at this information, in real-time, and share it with relevant employees
If a customer had a fantastic experience and left a score of ten out of ten, employees know that they’ve done a great job. And, if the customer only scored two or three out of ten, employees will see what they could do better in the future. In the eyes of employees, this type of insight helps the customer to become more real. It also gives them the information they need to start to self-learn.
Create a culture of self-learning, to improve for the customer
Feedback from your customers shows everyone what they’re doing well and where they need to improve. Negative feedback can be uncomfortable, but it also highlights where we can do better. For employees, seeing how their actions impact on the customer encourages them to take responsibility for the way they work.
You can take this a stage further and turn feedback into genuine self-learning opportunities. For example, use gamification to create real-time leaderboards that show where everyone in the team ranks. This approach motivates people to perform better - who doesn’t want to beat the rest of their team? It also this turns customer feedback from something abstract and removed into an intrinsic part of the way employees think about their day.
Looking to prove the return on investment for a Voice of the Customer programme? Explore our guide which demonstrates the impact a VoC programme can have on the bottom line...
