In 2008 Wal-Mart launched a major remodeling project called “Project Impact.” A large part of this was in response to customer research indicating Wal-Mart’s high-end bargain shopper wanted the “Target-style” layout featuring clear aisles and a more succinct product selection.  Yet, almost immediately after implementing these changes, sales began to drop.

This story illustrates a shortcoming of customer segmentation that relies on demographics, income, or profit potential alone. While customer segments can provide insight into who your customer is, they can’t tell you how a customer feels (emotional) or what they do (behavioral) in response to doing business with you.

Measuring Engagement Segments

In our line of work, we measure Engagement Segments. Engagement Segments are calculated based on customer responses to a set of emotional and behavioral questions. Their responses allow us to sort them into the following four categories:

• Fully Engaged: love the experience you deliver
• Engaged: happy
• On-the-Fence: not emotionally invested
• Actively Disengaged: make an effort to detract from your brand (telling their friends, family, Twitter account how awful you are)

Why Engagement Segments Matter

These segments become meaningful when combined with ROI analysis, to determine the impact of engagement on company performance . In addition, logistic regression analysis lends even deeper meaning as it helps to identify how to migrate customers from one segment to another. Project Impact may have tripped up by attempting to further engage customers who already enjoyed the Walmart experience, when the greatest profit potential would have been to focus on the drivers that turn ambivalent customers into happy shoppers.

While a customer experience strategy similar to Wal-Mart’s may find the greatest value in moving customers from On-the-Fence to Engaged, this won’t hold true across industries. In the case of our accounting data, we found that Fully Engaged clients increased spend with a given provider by a factor of greater than two compared to On-the-Fence clients. In this scenario it made sense for partners to focus their energy on consistently delivering the elements that were moving clients from Engaged to Fully Engaged.

Creating a more engaging customer experience does not mean that your company needs to be Amazon. It doesn’t mean that you need to take a leap of faith and simply hope to see the desired results. Creating a more engaging customer experience starts with understanding how your customer experience strategy fits into your overarching business strategy and then focusing on the drivers that will move more of your customers and clients into your most profitable engagement segment.

Additional Resources:

Voice of the Customer Solution

Improving the Client Experience: Accounting Industry

How Customer Feedback Can Help Create Meaningful Differentiation

Photo courtesy of Nutdanai

One clear message from the recent Accenture Global Consumer Survey is this: raising customer satisfaction scores alone is not enough to keep customers from leaving. This finding might have surprised some company executives who have invested heavily in their customer feedback programs, but shouldn’t surprise those who have outgrown CSAT scores and moved into a more strategic focus on improving the customer experience.

What are the key lessons from the Accenture survey?

1.  Companies need to broaden their focus beyond CSAT and identify ways of improving the Customer Experience (Cx). Strategy sessions with front line managers and senior leaders that map the customer experience help to identify gaps in the current experience and take a big picture view on how to improve it. From this framework, leaders can then address the systemic gaps that impact loyalty.

2. Don’t forget the Employee Experience (Ex) in the discussion about your customer strategy. The Accenture research states “During the buying experience, consumers are most frustrated with employees who are not knowledgeable and employees who are disrespectful of a consumer’s time.” Your front line and back office employees are the ones who are building or destroying brand loyalty every day. It’s essential to use qualitative and quantitative measures to assess the employee experience and address areas where you have deficiencies. In addition, customer feedback can be used to boost employee engagement.  Sharing positive customer feedback with your teams is an easy way to improve the employee experience and build a more engaged workforce.

3. There’s no question collecting and responding to customer feedback is essential. However, while most companies are good at collecting feedback, few are effective at responding and “closing the loop” on that feedback.  Closed-loop feedback involves collecting, responding to, and monitoring customer feedback in real-time (or as close to it as possible). The results of a well managed closed-loop feedback system are impressive. It not only builds accountability among managers and front line employees, it also positively impacts perceptions of your company brand among customers and employees.  

Several years ago PeopleMetrics worked with a multi-billion dollar company to conduct a large strategic customer research study. Since that time their world has changed dramatically.  They now face growing competitive pressures, declining customer loyalty, and CSAT scores at historic lows. What’s worse is this is a market leading company in their industry. Today this client realizes that a relentless and consistent focus on the customer experience is the route to regaining the ground they once held.

They are renewing their focus on the customer by moving beyond simply measuring and focusing on improving the experience as a whole. This involves tying the voice of the customer to improvements in people, processes, and technology and ultimately turning what has become a negative emotional experience for many customers into one that leaves a lasting positive memory.

Photo courtesy of: Sura Nualpradid

Additional Resources:

Evaluating the Consistency and Quality of Your Customer Experiences

The People Metric: Measuring the Customer Experience

Understanding the Employee Experience

This post is by Frank Rowe, SVP of Business Development and Marketing

A recent article in the New York Times titled “When Businesses Can’t Stop Asking, ‘How Am I Doing?’” addresses the real (and growing) problem of survey fatigue. Tools like SurveyMonkey and QuestionPro make it easy for every department of every company to ask customers about various aspects of the business. While this practice is easy internally, it is increasingly viewed by customers as a needless frustration.

Just because a company can ask customers questions, doesn’t mean they should. The request for your customers’ time should not be taken lightly. Customers offer valuable insight into your business, and the right to this insight must be earned.

This post will examine the four practices that help you earn this right, ensuring that customers will continue to offer the feedback you need to build a better business.

#1:  Don’t ask what you already know

Last year, our EVP Kate Feather wrote an article titled “Does Your Customer Feedback Process Say You’re Customer- or Company-Centric?” Kate explains that often companies want to avoid over-burdening their internal staff with the data gathering needed to match surveys with existing customer data. But while this practice of asking customers for demographic information or details about their existing relationship with your company may ease the burden internally, it clearly communicates that you either don’t know your clients or simply don’t care about the survey experience.

#2: Consider how customers experience your business prior to designing the survey

Before starting to collect the voice of your customers, it’s important to first understand how they experience your organization and what is likely most important to them. Where do they experience pain points in the process of doing business with you? How do they feel at each stage of the customer journey? Being aware of the entire experience from their point of view, not from your organization  view, ensures that the survey will provide you with insight on both the functional and emotional elements present across the entire customer journey.

#3:  Don’t be self-centered

Jonathan Levitt, CMO of OpinionLab, wrote a piece responding to the aforementioned NYT article titled “The Snore Factor: 3 Reasons to Ditch Long Surveys.” Levitt puts it simply: “Your brand’s not annoying, but your survey’s a different story.” Levitt reminds leaders that while they may need answers to questions about business performance, customers don’t really care about the same things. Forcing them to endure your tedious, self-serving survey will likely just mean you get a whole lot of invalid responses or drop off before they get to the end.

#4: Take immediate action on feedback

This could be a simple automated “thank you” that expresses that your company values the customer’s input or perhaps offers an explanation of how the feedback will be used. What matters is that customers hear that their feedback is important. If the customer reports a problem, technology solutions can make it easy for managers to take prompt recovery actions.

Photo courtesy of: Master isolated images 

Additional Resources:

Tips for Improving Customer Survey Response Rates

How to Make the Most of Customer Feedback

Closing the Customer Feedback Loop

Six Dimensions of an Engaging Customer Experience

Apple seems to have figured out intuitively what we have learned from all of our customer experience research.

We uncovered the following model for the dimensions of an engaging experience. Great customer experiences start with the basics: a solid offer and a company that cares enough to make it easy to do business with them. From there, it’s a matter of remaining consistent across touch points and earning trust. Plenty of companies do fine with those four. But to truly delight and create exceptional customer experiences, human involvement is required: employees who show extra effort and are genuine in their interactions.

While recently writing an annual report for a client, we analyzed a year of customer comments to identify “above and beyond” behaviors that customers highlighted in their feedback. The top three behaviors were as follows:

1)      Being friendly and welcoming and smiling

2)      Having a positive attitude and willingness to help; and

3)      Proactively assisting customers

From a business perspective these behaviors might seem trivial, but from a human perspective we all know how rare it is to see a company representative exhibiting these types of behavior. These simple behaviors take an average interaction and turn it into something delightful.

The idea of “behavioral innovation” says that too often innovation efforts focus on product, technology, or processes. But true innovation happens when you change what people do. Umair Haque says companies like Apple have shown behavior innovation by being fundamentally different. Who Apple is is just as important as what Apple creates. I remember my own experience buying an iPhone and how happily the salesperson pulled out his own phone to show me features and his favorite apps. His enthusiasm was contagious. Within minutes, a customer joined us to demonstrate to me how Facetime works. The customer shared how much he loves using the feature to chat with his niece a few states away. It was like the iPhone commercials in real life. Competitors can’t steal or copy a culture like that. This is a uniquely Apple experience that is difficult – if not impossible – for competitors to copy.

The Corporate Executive Board argues that customer delight is a profit wasting initiative, saying that companies should focus on getting the basics right and reducing customer effort. Their argument isn’t wrong. No customer will do business with you if you make it difficult. Further, a company must get the basics right to get and retain customers. But the evidence suggests that the things that truly delight customers are often intangible.

Our research offers evidence that a company focus on creating great customer experiences can also improve the employee experience. Understanding what “delight” means to the customers who buy from you is an opportunity to build your own unique internal culture, a chance to create an experience that differentiates your brand  – for both the people who purchase from you and those who work for you.

Photo courtesy of: Teerapun

Additional Resources:

How Customer Feedback Can Help Create Meaningful Differentiation

Seven Practices of a Customer-Centric Organization

Brand Ambassadors: How People Bring Your Brand to Life

Being the company champion of the customer experience can be exhausting work.  For many companies the old ways of doing things are entrenched. Creating the motivation to change takes something a bit more compelling than, “But it will make our customers really happy!” Somewhere between the insights gleaned from the customer feedback program and executing on those insights, there exists a massive gap that must be crossed in order for the investment in customer feedback to be justified. Crossing this gap tends to be the most challenging aspect of improving the customer experience.

Before customer experience leaders even have these insights in hand they have already met a series of hurdles: investing budget into Voice of the Customer technology, ensuring that the metrics being used have been linked to business outcomes, designing the survey, and implementing the technology, to name only a few. And yet these challenges tend to pale when faced with the daunting task of getting people, employees, and leaders alike to change their core behaviors.

In the telecommunications industry, they call the final stretch of connecting the communications provider to the customer “the last mile.” This final step is easy if you live in a city, but much more difficult if you live on a farm in rural Kansas. The last mile often becomes expensive as cables must be spread out to each individual. Yet without the investment in covering the last mile, all of the work done up to that point is utterly useless.

The problem in the telecommunications industry of connecting the company to the customer illustrates the problem of customer experience leaders. At this point most companies are collecting some customer feedback. But when this feedback does not change what leaders and employees do, then it has failed to connect to the customer experience. All of the effort put into collecting the feedback is wasted. Customer experience leaders face the challenge of connecting a large, spread-out organization with valuable insights coming into the company via customer feedback. We recommend making this connection in the following two areas:

Immediate Action: Voice of the Customer technology often includes “action alerts” triggered by specific customer responses. In our system, these alerts are sent to the appropriate manager and follow-up actions can be tracked through our online hub. The automatic nature of these alerts becomes a regular reminder of how important customers are to organizational success, and taking immediate action on feedback allows management to frequently connect with customers.

Strategic Change: In addition to taking immediate action on customer feedback, there also needs to be a top-level strategic focus on change. The 2011 Business-to-Business Customer Experience Management Benchmarking Study found that while 61% of companies present customer feedback data to all executives, only 27% share this feedback with all middle managers. Increasingly, we are encouraging clients to review their quarterly or annual customer insights reports alongside their front-line managers to bring the insights to life. Sharing access to this feedback across departments and titles helps the organization align around a shared vision of success and set a clear path on how to achieve the desired customer results, effectively bridging the gap between strategic insight and front-line action.

A consistently great customer experience is not an investment companies make just because “it will make our customers really happy!” It’s an investment that creates meaningful differentiation in the eyes of customers and clients, but not until customer feedback has covered the last mile and been connected to every department and person within an organization.

Interested in learning more about how PeopleMetrics can help your organization take your customer insight the last mile? Contact us for more information

Photo courtesy of:  Danilo Rizzuti

Additional Resources:

If Insight Falls in a Forest of Data, Does Anybody hear it?

Voice of the Customer Fact Sheet

Framework for Creating Consistently Great Customer Experience

There are many ways to get value from Voice of the Customer technology and there is often some variation in which aspects of the program our clients derive the most value from. This post will examine common questions that VoC has answered for various companies and industries and how customer feedback was used to drive change.

“How can we motivate employees to go above and beyond for customers?”

Industry:  Restaurant

Our client Service Inspired Restaurants is a casual dining chain that differentiates on service. They created a cycle of excellent service by making a practice of sharing Recognize Alerts (generated when a guest recognizes an employee for going above and beyond). In one year, the percentage of employees being recognized for delivering outstanding service went up six points and they found a clear correlation between employee recognition and higher guest spend.

“Where are we consistently damaging the customer experience?”

Industry: Telecommunications

Customer feedback can also effectively uncover the breakpoints in your experience – those moments of truth where customers are continually disappointed.  For example, in our Most Engaged Customers study, we found that the #1 problem in the Telecommunications Industry relates to Billing and Invoicing. Knowing this provides leaders with strategic direction to allocate budget, resources and time to most effectively improve the customer experience.

“How can we create more Fully Engaged customers?”

Industry: Accounting

Every business has their best customers, who spend the most, complain the least, and highly value the service you are delivering to them. These are the customers every business wants more of. In the Most Engaged Customers study, we closely examined the client experience in Accounting to see how these best clients talk about the accounting firms they love. Understanding this on an industry level can provide a valuable guide to improving the experience, and  on a company level it offers crystal clear instructions for employees at all levels and in all departments for delivering superior client experiences. 

“What makes us different in the eyes of our customers?”

Industry: Market Research Consulting

Brand differentiators have a tendency to use vague marketing-speak that says everything about how a company sees itself and nothing about how a customer or client sees it. Recently, our CEO reviewed several years of our client feedback and identified exactly what it is that makes us different in the eyes of our clients. Using client feedback in this way provides marketing with valuable insight on how to build a brand that is meaningfully different.

“How can we fix broken processes to improve the overall customer experience?”

Industry: Pharmaceuticals

The pharmaceutical industry has a history of sales processes that are company-centric (vs. customer-centric). But leaders in the pharma space are transforming the sales model from company-centric (or product-focused) to trusted partner. Doing this requires integrating customer feedback into strategic decisions to fix the processes that continually damage the experience.

In what areas has your company derived the most value from customer feedback?

Photo courtesy of: Stuart Miles

Republished with permission from CustomerThink.com

Recently I was given a Kindle for a birthday gift; one week later it quit working. A few days after, I mentioned to a friend that I had received this gift, and she asked to see it. “Well it’s not working at the moment,” I replied. She looked horrified. “Can you return it?! Do you have a gift receipt?!” she inquired. “Well not yet…but…I mean…I don’t think it will be a problem,” I stumbled along as she looked increasingly upset at my predicament. “It’s Amazon!” I finally burst out triumphantly. And I was right.

The very day after I messaged a customer service rep, a new Kindle was sent my way. No questions asked. No demands for gift receipts with impossible 10-digit codes. No accusations that I mishandled the device. No suspicion. They just sent me a new Kindle. And I never had to tell the gift-giver that the item was defective.

Trust in the Client Experience

Now imagine that the damaged product isn’t a $100 item, but a $200,000 consulting project? And the horrified friend is a colleague, and the awkward conversation won’t be with a kind gift-giver, but with a boss who believed that the chosen consulting firm would make the project successful. Imagine the supreme comfort that would come with being able to say, “Oh, I’m really not worried at all, I’m sure our trusted partner will take care of it.”

Of course trust is “just” a feeling, but our b2b Most Engaged Customers study offered some insight into just how important this feeling is to client Engagement. 99% of Fully Engaged clients report that they agree or strongly agree with the statement, “I trust that if something goes wrong [company] will make it right. Contrast this with just 10% of Actively Disengaged clients who feel the same way.

It is worth noting that our Engagement metric is rather stringent. A Fully Engaged Client is someone who says that they will absolutely:

• Keep working with you
• Go out of their way to work with you
• Recommend you
• And that they love the experience of working with you

In short, these are the most valuable clients you have, and 99% of them trust you. Want more Engaged clients? Start nurturing trust.

Building Trust

In a 2009 article, Dov Seidman offers sound advice on how to earn trust: “It doesn’t hurt to be honest and ethical. What most managers don’t get, though, is that the best way to build trust is to extend it to others.” In the same way that Amazon extended trust to me by effortlessly replacing my damaged device, Dov offers bold examples of other organizations doing the same. Netflix trusting their employees to take whatever vacation they feel they need; Radiohead, who released their album and asked their fans to pay what they want; and his own company, LRN, who has done away with detailed expense reports.

The “free” Radiohead album generated higher revenues than all previous releases, LRN realized much higher levels of trust in senior leadership, and Amazon got 80% of my Christmas shopping business.

The Cost of Low-Trust

In the article, “The Economics of Trust,” Stephen M.R. Covey offers insight into the financial gains of trust, “Trust always affects two measurable outcomes – speed and cost. When trust goes down, speed goes down and cost goes up. This creates a trust tax. When trust goes up, speed goes up and cost goes down. This creates a trust dividend. It’s that simple, that predictable.”

When Amazon chose to trust me, they increased speed, reduced the cost of customer service, and as an added bonus claimed a large portion of my Holiday budget.

And it’s not just me. A recent Peppers & Rogers Group Study, “Trustability in Healthcare,” found that respondents were willing to pay an average $30 a month more to work with an insurer they trust. Stephen Covey cites a 2002 Watson Wyatt surveyed 12,750 workers across industries and found that high-trust organizations had a total return to shareholders that was 286% higher than low-trust organizations.

Using Customer Feedback to Nurture Trust

In “Market, Hierarchy, and Trust: The Knowledge Economy and the Future of Capitalism,” Paul S. Adler offers a warning to business leaders:

Economic and organizational theory have shown that, compared to trust, price and authority are relatively ineffective means of dealing with knowledge-based assets. Therefore, as knowledge becomes increasingly important in our economy, we should expect high-trust institutional forms to proliferate.

Or put more simply, as data, information, and knowledge continue to grow so will the need to deeply trust those who handle it. Being the biggest in your industry with the most competitive prices won’t work as a business strategy in a market that places a premium on trust.

Customer feedback creates a bright opportunity to find out what builds trust with your customers and clients. And as you think about how to improve your delivered experience, begin examining how you could lower your trust tax by extending trust to your employees and clients.

Copyright CustomerThink Corp.

Customer-centricity is increasingly being viewed by leaders as a strategic priority. Based on employee feedback from the PeopleMetrics 2011 Employee Engagement Trends report, this four-part series examines the seven practices that differentiate a customer-centric from a company-centric company.

Practice #5: Provide employees with the necessary resources to solve customer problems

In our Employee Engagement Model, Resources is identified as one of the functional or extrinsic drivers of Engagement. Without the staff, technology, and support to do great work, people struggle to fully engage with their work. Employees in our study interpreted an investment in providing employees with proper resources as evidence that the company cares about customers and wants employees to do their best to take care of them.

It’s easy to profess customer-centricity at the executive level and build a nice marketing campaign around the idea, but failure to make the monetary investment in the appropriate resources is all the evidence your employees will need that leadership does not actually value the happiness of the customer. The effect of this failure on employee morale was evident in our study as this one employee demonstrates, “Upper management has just been looking at the financial numbers the last several years and has cut back so many people that we are not able to keep up the same level of customer service that we used to be so proud of.”

Practice #6: Share customer feedback with employees

CEOs who are focused on getting closer to the customer will also see the value in bringing the customer closer to the employee.  Adam Grant, Wharton Professor, wrote an article titled, “How Customers Can Rally Your Troops.” This article examines the power of sharing the end user experience with employees. One test he conducted looked at the highly disengaging work of a call center aiming to raise donations. He found that having real end users share their stories with employees – not inspirational speeches from managers or monetary incentives – had the largest impact on employee effectiveness. In the end, they saw a 171% increase of money raised.

While customer feedback is not a substitute for a real live person in front of your employees, it does provide insight into how employees’ work impacts customers in a meaningful way.  Customer feedback provides clear insight into what differentiates you in the eyes of your customer, and this information coupled with specific customer comments can tell a compelling story about the role employees play in creating better customer experiences.

Practice #7: Tell employees when they have done a good job serving customers

In a recent HBR post, “Why Appreciation Matters So Much,” Tony Schwartz, a renowned performance expert, writes, “Feeling genuinely appreciated lifts people up. At the most basic level, it makes us feel safe, which is what frees us to do our best work. It’s also energizing. When our value feels at risk, as it so often does, that worry becomes preoccupying, which drains and diverts our energy from creating value.” He references the work of researcher Marcial Losada who found that among high-performing teams, positive feedback outweighs negative feedback by a ratio of 5.6 to 1. And our own research confirms the power of sharing positive recognition. We found that employees who receive recognition from customers are 4.5 times as likely to be engaged compared to those who do not receive this feedback.

Customer-centric companies make a habit of letting employees know when they have done right by a customer. Based on the work of Adam Grant, we call this practice “outsourcing inspiration” because of how effectively this type of recognition embeds a sense of purpose in work.

In Bruce Temkin’s “Employee Engagement Benchmark Study,” he found that companies with good customer experiences have 2.5 times more engaged employees than companies with poor customer experiences. Is it any surprise then that the final three practices of customer-centric companies focus on supporting the work of employees? Customer-centric companies know that getting closer to the customer starts with creating an employee experience that allows employees to do genuinely good work.

Part 1 Seven Practices of a Customer-Centric Organization: Introduction

Part 2 Seven Practices of a Customer-Centric Organization: Customer Experience Starts at the Top

Part 3 Seven Practices of a Customer-Centric Organization: Caring Enough to Ask

Additional Resources:

Contact us to receive a copy of the 2011 Employee Engagement Trends Report

Customer-centricity is increasingly being viewed by leaders as a strategic priority. Based on employee feedback from the PeopleMetrics 2011 Employee Engagement Trends report, this four-part series examines the seven practices that differentiate a customer-centric from a company-centric company.

Practice #3: Invite customers to give feedback

In the 2010 report titled “Customer Feedback Management” Gleanster, a company that benchmarks best practices in technology-enabled business initiatives, focused on how top performing companies view their investment in customer feedback management. One section of this report asked companies how they maximize the value of a customer feedback initiative. While respondents derived quite a bit of value from things like sharing data and insights with the right people and the ability to draw actionable insights from customer feedback, there was one clear area in which respondents discovered value.

92% of respondents in the study cited the need to “instill an organizational focus on listening to the voice of the customer” as the most important value driver of their decision to collect customer feedback.  “When an organization internalizes this idea,” writes Gleanster, “it can drive cooperation across functional silos and empower front-line employees to question policies and processes that customers are telling them degrade their experience with the brand.”

Employees in our study viewed an investment in collecting customer feedback and acting on the responses as a sign of commitment to improve customer experiences.  One employee echoed the Gleanster finding saying, “We spend time and money on client feedback to make sure we are doing the best we can. We implement changes to make sure excellent service is delivered.” Verbal communication of the importance of focusing on the customer is important but can be bolstered by “putting your money where your mouth is” and investing in a Voice of the Customer Program that will allow customers to speak directly to your organization.

Practice #4: Invite employees to share ideas and suggestions on improving the customer experience

“There is no [employee] feedback asked for,” wrote one respondent to our survey, ”and when changes are made, our opinions or contributions due to experience (and knowing what works and what doesn’t) are not listened to.” The CBS show Undercover Boss illustrates how wide this gap is between executive decisions and employee knowledge. This reality show invites CEOs to go “undercover” in their own companies to see how policies, procedures, technology, etc. impact the employee experience and delivered customer service. Each episode closes with the company leader revealing his identity and making changes based on what he learned from his frontline people.

Only a handful of CEOs will have the opportunity to gain this unique perspective on how their company works but inviting employee feedback can provide similar benefits. Employees often hold deep knowledge of what customers need most, how to provide it, and systems that prevent them from delivering it. Asking for employee feedback is an important part of the Framework for Delivering Consistently Great Customer Experience and sends a powerful message to employees about the importance of their role in aligning the company around the customer.

The practice of collecting feedback is used consistently by customer-centric companies, and for the 88% of CEOs focused on getting closer to the customer, hearing the voice of customers and employees will be an integral step toward achieving this goal.

Part 1 Seven Practices of a Customer-Centric Organization: Introduction

Part 2 Seven Practices of a Customer-Centric Organization: Customer Experience Starts at the Top

Part 4 Seven Practices of a Customer-Centric Organization: The Role of Employees

Additional Resources:

Contact us to receive a copy of the 2011 Employee Engagement Trends Report

Customer-centricity is increasingly being viewed by leaders as a strategic priority. Based on employee feedback from the PeopleMetrics 2011 Employee Engagement Trends report, this four-part series examines the seven practices that differentiate a customer-centric from a company-centric company.

Practice #1: Make customers central to the mission

The Ritz Carlton Credo is a pristine example of writing the customer into the mission statement. It clearly defines the quality of guest interactions and a company commitment to the guest. Yet The Ritz Carlton is hardly the first company to write an interesting mission statement or make colorful claims about high levels of customer service. What gives this document power are the people who bring it to life. At the Ritz Carlton, the mission statement is more than a forgotten piece of marketing collateral; it’s a source of pride that employees rally around.

One employee in our study shared the following about their employer’s mission: “Because the company truly believes in the following motto, ‘Do the right thing, do whatever it takes, and have fun’, we literally do whatever it takes to make the customer happy.”

Making customers a part of the mission starts with physically writing the customer experience into key documents, and then using the remaining six practices to demonstrate a commitment to the customer-centricity goal.

Practice #2: Focus on highly loyal customers

In our Most Engaged Customer Study, the Cable & Satellite TV sector has claimed the lowest percentage of engaged customers for two years running. This is little surprise as this is one of the few industries that “punish” loyalty by raising prices the longer a customer stays with them.  In contrast, customer-centric companies place a premium on loyal customers.

An employee working in the retail sector shared how customer service policies affect employee work:  “Customer service is what we pride ourselves on and is how we keep customers coming back. We are known in the retail industry for our exceptional service to our members and guests, and it makes us happy to make customers happy.”  How a company treats its loyal customers sends a strong message to employees about whether a company is focused on better experiences or higher profits.

Organizations that value their loyal customers and stress the importance of their business to employees create an environment that naturally encourages employees to invest personally in relationships. One employee in our study perfectly captured how this dynamic changes the employee experience: “People take pride in working for a company that does right by its customers and value being part of a company that allows them to build lasting relationships with loyal customers and clients.”

Making customers central to the mission and focusing on building and sustaining customer loyalty are two practices that start at the top of an organization and require consistent communication. These are core practices that employees recognize as demonstrating their leaders’ commitment to the customer.

Part 1 Seven Practices of a Customer-Centric Organization: Introduction

Part 3 Seven Practices of a Customer-Centric Organization: Caring Enough to Ask

Part 4 Seven Practices of a Customer-Centric Organization: The Role of Employees

Additional Resources:

Contact us to receive a copy of the 2011 Employee Engagement Trends Report

Brand Ambassadors: How People Bring Your Brand to Life

An Effective Treatment Plan for the Average Customer Experience

Customer-centricity is increasingly being viewed by leaders as a strategic priority. Based on employee feedback from the PeopleMetrics 2011 Employee Engagement Trends report, this four-part series examines the seven practices that differentiate a customer-centric from a company-centric company.

In the 2010 IBM Report, “Capitalizing on Complexity: Insights from the Global Chief Executive Officer Study,” 88% of CEOs worldwide and 95% of standout CEO’s picked “getting closer to the customer [as] the most important dimension to realize their strategy in the next five years.” Authors of this report recommend to readers: “Establish an unprecedented level of focus. Starting with the CEO, every employee in the organization must be hyper-focused on customers. Make customer value your number one value.”

But as anyone responsible for leading organizational change knows, it’s easier said than done. Customer-centricity is more than the flawed and overly simplistic approach of “the customer is always right.” Rather, being customer-centric changes the core practices that affect how a company relates to both customers and employees. In an article titled “Profitably Linking Employee Behavior to Customer Loyalty and Advocacy,” Michael Lowenstein highlights one study in particular that found, “70% of customer brand perception is determined by experiences with people.” Demonstrating that leadership prioritizes customer-centricity is heavily dependent on the front-line employees responsible for bringing a company’s brand to life.

The good news is that customer-centric practices do not only serve the interests of the customer, they also serve to improve the employee experience.  In our 2011 Employee Engagement Trend report, we were interested in examining how an organization’s approach to customer-centricity impacts employees, and we found a compelling story. Using employee feedback, we were able to extract seven practices that differentiate customer-centric from company-centric companies. We will examine each of these practices in the following three parts of this series.  

Customer-centric companies consistently follow these seven practices and boast 6x the number of Fully Engaged employees and 12x fewer Actively Disengaged employees than their company-centered counterparts. These seven practices reveal how leaders are successfully communicating to employees that getting close to the customer is imperative to the future growth and success of the company.

Part 2 Seven Practices of a Customer-Centric Organization: Customer Experience Starts at the Top

Part 3 Seven Practices of a Customer-Centric Organization: Caring Enough to Ask

Part 4 Seven Practices of a Customer-Centric Organization: The Role of Employees

Additional Resources:

Contact us to receive a copy of the 2011 Employee Engagement Trends Report

Brand Ambassadors: How People Bring Your Brand to Life

Why Do Employees Deliver Great Customer Experiences? It’s Not ALL About the Money!

WorkSimple, a social work performance platform,  predicts that in 2012 we will see “the growth of empowerment and engagement” as a core strategic focus. If you are one of the managers or leaders currently looking for ways to better empower your employees, here are three recommended actions:

1. Remove barriers to success

At the start of any new Employee or Customer Engagement project, we will typically conduct interviews or focus groups with employees to uncover these barriers. Leaders don’t often see them. Policies that are put in place to lower costs, improve productivity, or achieve other good intentions can unwittingly become daily frustrations that prevent employees from doing great work.

Harvard professors Teresa M. Amabile and Steven J. Kramer coined the term “the Progress Principle,” to describe how the ability to make meaningful progress at work impacts the employee experience.  When employees are prevented from making consistent progress in their work, they disengage. Leaders who remove the daily barriers that prevent employees from making “small wins” everyday can expect to see an increase in motivation and innovation.

2. Create a supportive culture

While leaders within a company hold considerable influence in the internal culture of a company, it is unfair for managers to assume it is their sole responsibility to create a positive environment. Often there are great things already happening in a company – strong teams, gatherings after hours, inspiring customer feedback. Uncovering these activities and sources of inspiration saves leaders from the exhausting efforts of building a strong work culture while simultaneously encouraging employees to take shared responsibility in building a better workplace.

3. Allow for trial and error

Thomas Edison famously stated, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

In spite of this famous inventor’s words, however, most of us – employees, managers, and executives alike – are extremely uncomfortable with the idea of finding 10,000 ways that will not work. 

HBR blogger, Amy C. Edmondson wrote an article last April titled, “Strategies for Learning from Failure,” in which she makes the point that the desire to avoid mistakes often leads to assigning blame and simplistic answers to why the failure happened.  Leaders quickly move on and miss an opportunity to learn more about the mistake. Unfortunately, in doing this they create a culture increasingly unlikely to take a chance on a new idea. If you want to empower your employees to do something new, exciting, or innovating, it may be time to change how your organization talks about and responds to failure.

Of course, this list is only the beginning. What actions has your company taken to improve employee engagement and empowerment?

Additional Resources

Using the Voice of Your Employees (VoE) to Improve the Employee Experience

Employee Engagement: Helping Employees Find Meaning on the Job

2011 Employee Engagement Trends Report

Photo courtesy of: jscreationzs

Better experiences – every customer and employee wants them, businesses want to provide them, and solutions providers promise them. But how does one actually track something as elusive as an “experience”? The following is an introduction to how we help companies measure their delivered experiences.

At PeopleMetrics, we focus on tracking both behavioral and emotional outcomes. And while this approach can be a bit more complicated to explain, the composite score is proven to be more reliable than a single item score. In fact, when we compared our 2008 Most Engaged Customers data to our 2010 data, we found that a five point increase in Engagement correlated with a 56% cumulative share price appreciation.

This composite Engagement score is made up of four outcome questions, and we call the score REAP (as in “REAP the benefits” of an engaged customer base).

(R): Retention

Why: Engaged customers will spend more with you over their lifetime than with your competitors, and engaged employees will continue working for you

 (E): Effort

Why: Engaged customers will actually go out of their way to do business with you and are often willing to spend more to benefit from your products and services. Engaged employees feel inspired by their work environment to go above and beyond for customers.

(A): Advocacy

Why: Engaged customers spread the good word, making it easier and cheaper for you to attract new customers. Engaged employees recommend you as an employer allowing you to better compete for talent.

(P): Passion

Why: Engaged customers are passionate about the brand – so passionate that they may even spend time actively promoting the brand to others or defending the brand if others speak negatively about it. Engaged employees love the experience of working for you.

The composite of these four questions is the “ultimate score” or the “people metric.” It provides a snapshot of your most valuable assets: the people who purchase from you and work for you.

Additional Resources:

Introduction to Voice of the Employee

Introduction to Voice of the Customer

Taking Action on Customer Feedback

Photo courtesy of: Paul

In a report titled, “The Digital Universe Decade – Are You Ready?” EMC stated that in 2010 alone, 1.2 zettabytes of digital information was created. This is equal to:

• The digital information created by every man, woman, and child on Earth “Tweeting” continuously for 100 years

• 75 billion fully-loaded 16 GB Apple iPads (which would fill the entire area of Wembley Stadium to the brim 41 times)

• A full-length episode of FOX TV’s “24″ running continuously for 125 million years

 And as this forest of data grows, so does the technology available to measure and manage it, and the effects are overwhelming. In “Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds,” Scott Berkun shares an example of a broken down Winnebago spiraling out of control at 95mp and the driver asking the passengers where they would like to stop for dinner. He writes,

As ridiculous as this scenario sounds, it happens all the time. People worry about the wrong thing at the wrong time and apply their intelligence in ways that doesn’t serve whatever they’re trying to achieve. Some call this wisdom, in that the wise know what to be thinking about, where as the merely intelligent only know how to think.

In our customer and employee experience work we are seeing many business leaders exhausted with business intelligence. It’s not difficult to collect satisfaction surveys and come up with good ideas on how to improve the quality of delivered experiences. The difficulty lies in sorting through that data and finding what your customers care about most, and then focusing attention on those items. Here are three ways we are seeing customer experience leaders navigate the forest of data, to find the insights that drive change:

1. Moving past the “ultimate metric”

Customer satisfaction scores, NPS, even our own Engagement Metric – REAP, have dominated the customer and employee experience scene. These numbers are valuable and useful but can be limiting. While these metrics can tell you if you improved and by how much, they can’t tell how, and most importantly, they can’t tell you why. Many leaders are taking an increased interest in looking at the behaviors, experiences, or interactions that impact shifts in the ultimate metric.

2. Aligning around a set of core metrics

Key driver analysis allows leaders to see into the ultimate metric. If your ultimate score has decreased, looking at your key drivers will offer insight into why this happened, and clearly define the items most in need of attention.

For many of our clients, we set up models of their drivers. These models provide a set of core metrics that an organization can rally around. In quarterly reporting, we will walk through changes in these drivers and use customer comments to bring the drivers to life. This practice allows business leaders to truly understand the customer experience ecosystem.

3. Improved ability to ignore extraneous data

As our clients begin seeing results based on taking action on the drivers, many of them are increasingly ok with not wasting time on the extraneous data. Typical “satisfaction” questions around things like cleanliness and hold times are often axed as leaders see the value in forgoing the 70 page report for a 1 page summary that can be shared across the company. Because once there is unity on what to think about, it is often clear how best to approach the problem (Click to tweet).

The next few years are only going to bring more data. Leaders will feel a rising pressure to measure and manage everything that can possibly be measured. But the winner will not be the person with the most data; the winner will be the one with the wisdom to know what to think about. And by tuning out all of the data noise, will be receptive to hearing the piece of insight that matters most.

Additional Resources:

Taking Action on Customer Feedback

An Effective Treatment Plan for the Average Customer Experience

Photo courtesy of: Dan

Last year we launched our first annual Brand Ambassador Awards. We have found over the past 10 plus years of working in customer and employee engagement that every company has individuals in it who continually go above and beyond for clients. Using customer feedback we uncover their stories.

These employees have an empathetic understanding of the customer experience. They find ways for clients to save money. They get to know their businesses. They make customers smile.  They deliver. They create the human connection that brings the brand to life. They are the people the Brand Ambassador Awards recognize.

Last year we had the opportunity to talk with each of our 2011 winners about their customer service philosophy – why they do what they do. In each of these conversations we heard three key themes:

The company has a customer service philosophy that aligns with their own

Our Brand Ambassadors didn’t hesitate to acknowledge the customer-centric cultures that they worked in, and they were proud to be a part of them.  Further support: we found in our 2011 Employee Engagement Trends study that employees who work for customer-centric companies show much higher levels of Engagement.

The Point: If you want to get more Brand Ambassadors, emphasize the customer experience and align your company’s culture around it.

The individual feels a sense of pride, engagement, and personal responsibility

Our winner’s spoke about connecting on a human level, treating customers as they would want to be treated; the meaning that great customer service gives to life; and the personal responsibility that goes along with being the face of a company.

The Point: Brand Ambassadors care deeply about how their work impacts people, and sharing customer feedback is a valuable way to encourage them and their co-workers to continue doing exceptional work.

They rely on their team to help them deliver exceptional experiences

Each of our winners spoke about how they could not deliver great experiences without their team. In fact, one of our winners seemed genuinely confused by the personal recognition, insisting there was no way he could have done it alone.

The Point: If someone is constantly highlighting their own contributions, assume that while they might still being doing good work for your customers and clients, they are probably not a Brand Ambassador.

As you work toward achieving your customer experience goals in 2012, make sure to identify and celebrate your Brand Ambassadors. These individuals know what makes your customers completely happy. Don’t miss the opportunity to learn from their wisdom.

And watch out for our soon to be announced winners of the 2012 awards.

Additional Resources:

Unleash the Power of Your Brand Ambassadors

Outsourcing Inspiration: How Customer Feedback Creates Meaning at Work

Voice of the Customer Fact Sheet

Photo courtesy of: Michal Marcol

Engaging employees can be a daunting task, and with all of the jargon out there, it’s easy to get lost and not know what next steps to take.  In this post, we examine the eight dimensions of our Employee Engagement model, illustrated with real-life examples of companies who embody what these drivers are all about.

First, Resources and Rewards are the functional aspects of Employee Engagement. They are fundamental to the contract between an employee and a business.  Resources and Rewards need to be competitive and fair – without these basics, you cannot hope to satisfy, let alone, engage your employees. Pretty simple.

The intrinsic aspects are where it starts to get a bit more complicated…

Recognition in Accounting

One of our clients in the Accounting industry has the goal to deliver unmatched client service by aligning all employees around the company’s five core values. Using a homegrown “Twitter-like” application, employees nominate colleagues for doing something exceptional relating to these values. Throughout the year rewards and recognition will be given based on these nominations, and at the end one lucky employee will win a Mazda Miata 5 for their contributions.

Customer Focus at BUPA

BUPA is a health insurance company in the UK that is absolutely committed to their customers. Last year they won the Plain English Campaign Award for their gobbledygook-free website. In providing easy to understand information, BUPA has also built a culture of empathy toward the customer experience.

And this culture extends beyond the website. At the CXPA event this past October, our EVP Kate Feather learned of an interesting approach taken by BUPA to bring the customer front and center in the business. Specifically, the story goes that every BUPA customer service agent is given a budget to do something nice for their customers. One employee spent her budget on clothes for a baby born prematurely. In the retelling of this story the employee had tears in her eyes as she described how it felt to have the opportunity to touch someone’s life so closely.

Fun at American Hotel Register

The Fun dimension has a tendency to confuse the more practical among us. But the fun dimension captures so much more than holiday parties and water cooler chit chat about weekend plans. It’s about a sense of belonging, shared vision, and creativity. Another one of our own clients, American Hotel Register, provides every conceivable product for hospitality and specialty industries – including funeral homes. They take pride in having an open, quirky culture. The founder regularly walks the halls, greets people by name, gives employees hugs; they have daily guess the answer to the Snapple cap questions; and in January American will be hosting its second annual American Idol Competition at their annual Hospitality Expo.

Recently they had the opportunity to provide the producers of Glee with funeral urns for an upcoming episode, one of the American Hotel employees commented that American Hotel “puts the ‘FUN’ in FUNeral.” The directors liked it so much the little play on words made it into the Glee script.  

Growth at Lovett

Unless you live in Portland, Oregon, you probably haven’t heard of Lovett. Lovett has built an impressive company by focusing on employee Growth. They have built a solid training curriculum involving mentor-style orientation, options to learn skills in other departments, and even life skills like financial planning and investing. Lovett understands how important it is to have a team of smart, customer-focused employees who understand the company’s big picture vision. Even more surprising is that Lovett isn’t a cutting-edge management consulting firm, or an HR group; they do plumbing. And their staff retention rate is 100%.

Trust at Wegmans

The Trust dimension is really about trust in senior leadership – that they have employees’ best interests in mind and respect and value their work. At Wegman’s, this means involving store-level employees in the kinds of decisions typically made at higher levels, and avoiding creating policies addressing every possible scenario. The company’s philosophy is, “Employees first, customers second,” and by putting their employees first, their employees put the customers first – and Wegman’s boasts one of the best retention rates in the country and some of the highest customer ratings among grocery stores.

Purpose in Healthcare

Purpose is linked to a sense of accomplishment in work, the knowledge that a person’s work is having a positive impact on internal and external customers. Medtronic is a medical device manufacturer. They provide the opportunity for their engineers, technicians, and salespeople to attend surgical procedures so they can see the results of their work.

One of our Healthcare clients also has a great tactic for embedding a sense of purpose in their work. The patients they serve have central nervous system disorders; our client displays patient artwork throughout their hallways as well as printing mini reprints on the back of their business cards as a daily reminder of their commitment to improving the lives of the patients they serve.

What Drives Engagement at Your Company?

It’s overwhelming for any leader to think about tackling all of these dimensions at once. So we recommend starting small. Focus on one dimension that you can do (or perhaps are already doing) and build it out – whether it is getting your employees closer to your customer, building internal growth plans, or recognizing employees who do great work.

And, of course, if you are ready for some professional help, contact us. Our expertise lies in helping clients identify what their employees care about the most so they can focus action on the items that will have the greatest impact on their employees’ experiences.

Additional Resources:

Why Do Employees Deliver Great Customer Experiences? It’s Not ALL About the Money!

Using the Voice of Your Employee (VoE) to Improve the Employee Experience

Case for a Voice of the Employee (VoE) Solution

If there is one master customer experience rule, I think it would be this: solve your customers’ problems. Every change, every action, every improvement should have the end goal of solving a customer problem. So how does this apply to the Pharma industry?

Pharma’s Past

Pharmaceutical companies served what seemed to be a fairly straightforward purpose: providing customers with information and access to newer and better drugs.  And this worked for a long time. However, over the past few years, it is estimated that the Pharmaceutical industry has experienced a 30% industry-wide reduction in sales force numbers.  What worked in the past isn’t cutting it anymore.

Between increasing government regulation, a decreasing amount of physician face-time, and a barrage of multi-million dollar lawsuits, Pharma companies cannot survive, and thus continue to help their customers, without shifting from being product-centric to patient-centric.  

Pharma’s Present

Pharma’s customer base is made of up people who have one pressing problem: the patient. Their jobs are exhausting and involve long hours, high risk, changing rules and regulations, and the constant stress of carrying patients’ health and lives in their hands. Pharma’s opportunity then lies in their ability to stop selling to, and start partnering with, their customers to solve their biggest problem: how to better serve the patient.

An oversimplified view of the patient experience looks something like the figure at right. It is a combination of a patient’s interactions with their healthcare provider, their insurance company, and the therapy itself. The opportunity for Pharma lies in the overlap of all of these interactions. If Pharma is able to break down these walls and make it easier to prescribe, easier to gain insurance reimbursements, and easier for patients to access and take the treatment they need, then they have solved their customers’ most pressing problem.

Pharma’s Future

Over the past few months, we have met with people involved in Healthcare Compliance and Legal, Sales Force Effectiveness, Learning & Development, Incentive Compensation, and Access Services across a variety of different Pharmaceutical companies. The conversations vary based on the group’s particular patient touch point, b. Some groups are interested in improving patient and customer education, some are interested in building better relationships between sales reps and physicians, and some are interested in improving access processes. But all share the common goal of improving the patient experience by shifting from a product-centric to a customer-centric approach.

This shift in focus is transforming the Pharma industry. Instead of sales reps fighting the losing battle of gaining physician face-time, entire companies will align around improving the service delivered to patients. For example, we have heard talk of concierge services, a completely customer-centric approach that focuses on delivering customized solutions to the patient – the right product, at the right time, through the right channel.

Focusing solely on the product – providing awareness and information – isn’t enough anymore.  Customized solutions are what Pharma customers need now. For Pharma companies to survive, and thrive, they need to bend to the medical professionals who are done with the sales pitch and ready for the experience of working with a trusted partner.

2011 has been a great year for all of us here at PeopleMetrics as well as the Customer Experience space at large. And so in honor of the close of this year and a start of the new one, we’d like to share four customer experience themes we uncovered this past year.

Building a Customer-centric Culture

A key theme throughout 2011 was the importance of engaging employees and managers in order to engage customers and clients.  The ability to align everybody, from senior management to front-line employees, around the desired customer experience is essential to the success of any customer experience transformation journey.

As part of this, earlier this year, we announced our Brand Ambassador Award Winners, the individuals in our top performing client companies, who garner high levels of customer recognition and praise.  We also had the opportunity to interview these individuals and heard from each and every one of them that the work environment and culture is a key part of their motivation to deliver great experiences to their customers. In July we conducted an independent study on Employee Engagement where we found that employees working for customer-centric organizations are more engaged with their work and give extra effort as a result.

Customer-centricity will never happen without employee buy-in. As Elizabeth Boehm said at Forrester’s Customer Experience Forum, “Your culture is what your employees do when you’re not in the room.”

Walking in Your Customer’s Shoes

We believe that customer feedback technology is essential in helping companies to understand, measure, and manage customer experiences. This technology allows companies to systematically listen and respond to their customers. However, we also know that without a real commitment to improving these experiences, this feedback just becomes more unused data. A 2011 trend we have noticed is the desire to move beyond the NPS or loyalty number and seek to understand the, “why?” behind these ratings.  The goal is to truly connect with the customer– not just the score.

Mike Sachs, General Manager, CRM & Owner Loyalty at Volkswagen of America spoke at the NACCM conference earlier this fall and shared his novel approach to helping VW executives truly connect with the customer experience.   One of the benefits (and ironies) of being a leader in the automotive business is that you are never actually a customer – you never have to purchase a car.  What this means, according to Mike, is that VW leaders are prevented from experiencing how it feels to buy a car from a VW dealership.   So, Mike plans to implement an initiative in 2012 that will have every executive go through the car buying journey (that will then be donated to charity) so they are better able to understand the experiences their customers are having every day in their dealerships.

Finding Your Best Customers

This year we noticed an increasing number of our clients taking an interest in our “Market” and “Recognize” alerts (part of our Voice of the Customer technology). Both of these alerts focus on what your customers and clients love about doing business with you. Leaders are realizing that knowing what makes you great in your customers’ eyes is marketing gold.

At the NACCM Conference, Becky Carroll (@bcarroll7) spoke about her efforts to build an online community of Verizon’s best customers who are willing to offer and test new ideas. Becky shared that 90% of Verizon’s latest releases have been suggested, or refined by Verizon customers. Evidence of the deep value in finding, and capitalizing, on your very best customers.

Sharing Ownership of the Customer Experience

At Forrester’s Customer Experience Forum Kerry Bodine introduced “The Customer Experience Ecosystem,” which she defined as: “The complex set of relationships among your company’s employees, partners, and customers that determines the quality of all customer interactions.” In other words, the customer does not belong to one department or function.  Every brochure that is produced,  every bit of code that is written, every employee that is hired is part of this ecosystem and ultimately everybody impacts the customer.

Many of our own clients are asking for ideas on how to share customer feedback with more employees because an annual executive presentation is simply not enough anymore. Customer feedback is powerful and inspirational, and to change the ecosystem, these stories (whether quantitative or qualitative) need to be shared.

It’s been an exciting year, and we’re looking forward to what 2012 has to offer.

Happy New Year!

At PeopleMetrics, we include one question that often strikes new clients as being rather odd, especially clients in the B2B space: “I love working with [company].” Respondents are asked to rate their level of agreement with this statement. Why do we include it? Because it adds a depth to the client/provider relationship that cannot be attained through a simple NPS score.  This question cuts through all the usual business jargon, formalities, and contracts and asks a completely emotional human question – how does the company make you feel?

Why It Matters

In our Most Engaged Customers Study it became quite clear that while clients are willing to continue working (68%) and recommend their supplier (65%), they are much less likely to report loving the experience of working with them (55%). This love question raises the bar on what makes an engaging experience, and by including it we have found that “Fully Engaged” becomes a strong indicator of client spend.  Clients in the Accounting industry who Strongly Agreed with all four engagement measures* spent, on average, 50% more with their preferred vendor than the Actively Disengaged, proving that when a client loves the experience of working with you, they will show it.

How to Make Them Love You

In our research we have found six drivers of Engagement. Each of these drivers is vital in creating an engaging client experience; for the accounting client, Extra Effort is most important (when employees go above and beyond for clients).  In our Most Engaged Customers study we went on to analyze open ended responses to further identify what “extra effort” means to accounting clients. We boiled it down to three employee behaviors:

1. Employee provides proactive advice, expertise, and guidance. Notice how it is impossible to deliver this without knowing your client’s industry. Making Extra Effort to understand the environment in which your client is working means that you will move from being an easily replaceable commodity to a valued partner.

2. Employee demonstrates an understanding of the client’s unique culture.  Many of the stories talked about how people at the accounting firm stepped in and helped deliver when coworkers became sick or clients were particularly demanding.  This kind of “above and beyond” service can only happen if a partner is willing to put in the time to learn not only what their client does but also what their processes are for getting it done.

3. Employee has a positive attitude towards the organization for which they work. Speaking well of your employer is associated with employee engagement, and this simple act is perceived by the client important in creating a positive experience.
Going above and beyond in these areas shows that your client’s problems are your problems, and that you are committed to making them successful. And really, isn’t that what love is all about?

 
*Engagement is measured based upon the responses to the following four questions: 1.) Given the choice I would do business with [Company] again 2.) I would go out of my way to do business with [Company] again 3.) I would recommend [Company] to a colleague or business partner 4.) I love doing business with [Company]. A Fully Engaged Client Strongly Agrees with each of these statements.

Additional Resources:
2010 Most Engaged Customers Study: Accounting Focus (email info@peoplemetrics.com to request a copy)
Customer Experience Assessment Tool

 
Photo courtesy of: Renjith Krishnan

Shopping for insurance tends to be one of life’s less enjoyable moments – it’s difficult, time-consuming, and simply stressful. Data from our Most Engaged Customer study shows that the average Insurance engagement (ignoring the outlier that is USAA) is 42%, 9 points below the Engagement average across industries, as seen in the chart below.

Changing the Insurance Experience
According to a recent Accenture survey, 91% of insurers “believe that future growth depends on providing a special customer experience.” So it would appear that the industry has realized the current system is flawed and is actively interested in bridging the gap between average and exceptional. But what does an “exceptional customer experience” look like in the insurance industry? This the question we ask in the Most Engaged Customers study and we found that, regardless of industry, Customer Engagement is built from the following dimensions:

1. The Offer: Products, services, and/or experiences that customers really want

2. Care: A company culture that cares for and values customers

3. Consistency: Excellent service at every touch point

4. Trust: If something goes wrong, the customer has faith the company will put it right

5. Effort: Employees who exert extra effort and go above and beyond

6. Genuine: Authentic service from real people

The “hot button” issue for insurance customers is Effort – employees going above and beyond for the customer. This is especially true during Moments of Truth such as policy purchase, renewals and claims. Quotes we collected from our study illustrate the impact of Extra Effort perfectly:

“They went out of their way to find us discounts, cut back on what we really didn’t need in insurance.” (Progressive)

“They have always guided me to the best products for my point in life.” (USAA)

“My reps take their time going over questions. They also helped me to tow my vehicle. They went out of their way to offer to Google a tow company, provided me the number & called to confirm the company would be able to tow my vehicle in 30 minutes. THEY ARE AWESOME!” (Allstate)

Aligning the Company
68% of the insurers in Accenture’s study say they plan to increase spending on analytics, including data that will help them improve the customer experience. This is the first step in building a better offer and demonstrating care for customers. But it can’t stop there.

The next step will be aligning managers around this new mission to ensure consistency and nurture trust. And finally, based on our research, we predict that the true differentiator will be building a company culture that inspires front-line employees to give extra effort and allows them the freedom to be genuine in their interactions with policyholders.

To truly implement lasting change, every level of the company will need to be on board and playing their part in building better, more engaging, more memorable customer experiences.

Additional Resources:
Request a copy of the complete Most Engaged Customers Study with the Insurance Industry Focus
An Effective Treatment Plan for the Average Customer Experience
PeopleMetrics Voice of the Customer Solution