As we found out in the previous chapters, the customer experience is made up of the impressions your customers get from their interactions with your company throughout their customer journey. It factors in every emotion they experience, at every touchpoint they have with your brand and its employees. And who is there at each touchpoint, inspiring these emotions? Your employees!
For that reason, employee engagement and symmetry of attention should have an important place in your omnichannel strategy. A good customer experience starts with a good employee experience!
Get Your Employees Engaged in Your Omnichannel Strategy
If you give your employees a good experience, they'll be more capable of providing good customer service. An employee who feels heard and has a strong sense of belonging to their company will be better at listening to customers. They will also feel more invested in the success of their own work.
Think about your own workplace.
Do you feel a sense of belonging to your company?
Discover the Employee Experience
The employee experience is an employee's perceptions and interactions throughout their journey at a company. The concept of the employee experience has been built in symmetry with the concept of the customer experience.
As we've learned, the principle of the customer experience consists of placing customer expectations at the center of attention in every interaction with the brand. The employee experience is built on a similar principle, but this time, it's internal.
The company implements concrete measures to keep their employees engaged and satisfied. An employee who feels fulfilled at work will perform better, and can even become an ambassador for the company. That's why some companies do everything they can to take care of their employees and their work environment.
It's inevitable that the employees at your company will talk about work around friends, family, and other people. Because your employee ambassadors know the company inside out, their opinions on it will be seen as highly credible by people around them.
Keep in mind also that employee engagement has a direct impact on your company's performance. Aon Hewitt's 2017 report, Trends in Global Employee Engagement, shows that when "employee engagement increases by five points, revenue for the following year increases by three points."
How do you explain that?
A higher level of engagement leads to more productive employees. The employee experience is also a money saver. It can help reduce employee turnover as well as the resulting costs of training and onboarding new staff.
Who in the company should be involved in the process of creating an omnichannel strategy?
In order to have a complete and representative view of the customer's experience, you have to put together a diverse team that includes employees from multiple different departments of the company.
First, you have to make sure you get the company's upper management involved, and have one of them join your team. That person will have the authority to allocate budgets and champion your marketing strategy at the highest levels of the company.
Next, encourage collaboration. Involving all your teams in the process, starting from the first brainstorming sessions, is the key to getting them engaged in this transformation strategy. People are more inclined to embrace changes when they had a hand in the planning process for those changes.
For example, you can involve:
point-of-sale staff. Since they interact directly with customers on a regular basis, these employees have their finger on the pulse when it comes to customer issues, reactions and expectations.
customer service staff. These employees are also highly aware of customer issues, and they regularly collect customer feedback and comments.
a human resources representative. An HR staff member will be able to contribute their knowledge of the employee experience. And it's by providing a positive experience for its employees that a company is able to offer a satisfactory experience to its customers.
a member of the marketing team. The Marketing department is the most dialed in to the issues of customer satisfaction and loyalty, thanks to key performance indicators (KPIs). These indicators, and how they're analyzed, will be crucial to creating a customer journey map.
an employee from the financial department. This team member can contribute their perspective on turnover and profitability when you map out your customer journey.
To round out this cross-disciplinary team, the company can opt to bring some volunteer customers on board. Including actual customers in the mapping process can bring up key information that the company might not have yet, significantly improving the development and results of your marketing strategy.
Apply the Symmetry of Attention Theory
A study by the Temkin Group showed that the customer experience is generally better at companies with strong employee engagement.
As Richard Branson put it: "if you take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients."
The concept of symmetry of attention was first developed in the service industry–more specifically, the hotel industry. It generates a virtuous circle:
Your employees, believing in the symmetry, become promoters for their work and your company.
They are assets to the brand, and their enthusiasm is contagious.
They may start to have a positive influence on other employees.
This general enthusiasm raises the quality level of the service you provide, and the customer gets a better experience.
To keep this virtuous circle in motion, you have to facilitate and monitor the symmetry of attention so you can be sure that the managers are contributing to employee well-being, and that the employees stay focused on customer satisfaction.
To assess your employees' well-being in the workplace, you can survey everyone working for the company. Likewise, you can share customer feedback with all your employees to get them interested in customer satisfaction.
How should I share this feedback?
Here's a quick and simple tip for making your feedback visible to everyone. Put up a poster in a high-traffic location at the company, displaying your latest customer verbatims. It's an easy thing to do, and it really creates a sense of unity:
Positive verbatims are motivating and in turn contribute to your employees' well-being by showing them the concrete results of their everyday work.
Negative verbatims show areas of improvement that they can work on.
Form an Employee Engagement Action Plan
Your strategy for getting your employees engaged should be tailored to fit your company, its culture and its goals.
I suggest that you start with the employees who work in direct contact with customers—it will be easier to get them on board, and later, you can extend your approach to all the other employees in the company.
How do I engage my employees?
I recommend putting together a six-step action plan.
Take care when onboarding new employees.
Just like the customer experience, the employee experience covers the whole of an employee's journey.That means the first steps are crucial. You have to be extremely attentive to the quality of the onboarding process for your new hires.
Offer employee training programs regularly.
Once your employees are onboarded, you can focus your efforts on training. To keep your employees motivated and engaged, it's important to allow them to grow in their positions and duties, and to do that, you need to give them the tools for success.To assist your employees in their professional development, human resources can implement an internal, voluntary training policy, as well as other initiatives to improve their quality of life in the workplace.
Develop a corporate culture.
In recent years, young people entering the workforce have been looking to join companies whose core values they share and will want to help uphold. The prestige associated with a brand's image is no longer enough for them. Your corporate culture and management approach will define these core values.Encourage autonomy and empowerment.
The customer experience depends on the involvement of your employees. And to keep your employees involved, you have to listen to them, encourage feedback, and allow them to feel empowered at work.Improve quality of life in the workplace.
The working environment is an important factor for motivating your employees. A pleasant workplace will boost their productivity and their attention to customer service.Integrate tools that will make your employees' lives easier.
Caring about the employee experience also means providing them with tools that will make their lives easier (e.g., software, equipment).
By implementing this action plan, you'll develop your employer promise and improve your employer brand in order to:
improve the employee experience.
attract the best talent to your company.
stack the odds in your favor to offer the best possible customer experience.
Let's Recap!
The concept of the employee experience is formed in symmetry with the concept of the customer experience.
To create an employee experience, you must:
involve your employees in the process of developing your omnichannel strategy.
offer your employees a good experience at work. That way, they'll be better at serving your customers.
Apply the symmetry of attention by paying as much attention to your employees as you do to your clients. This generates a virtuous circle. Your employees become advocates for their work and your company.
To engage your employees, you'll need a six-step action plan:
Take care when onboarding new employees.
Offer employee training programs regularly.
Develop a corporate culture with shared core values.
Encourage autonomy and empowerment.
Improve quality of life in the workplace.
Integrate tools that will make your employees' lives easier.
Improving your employees' experience at your company will give you the best chance of offering the best possible customer experience and having a successful omnichannel strategy.
And with this chapter and this final, crucial step, we've reached the end of our course on the omnichannel customer experience.
Between the course content, interviews, and the Home Made case study designed especially for you, now you have the keys to succeed in your omnichannel project.
It's been a great pleasure to guide you in building your strategy. I wish you lots of success!
