Employee Engagement and Customer Experience
In a recently published Temkin Group Insight Report, the Temkin Group revealed and explained their four Customer Experience core competencies. These core competencies are Purposeful Leadership, Compelling Brand Values, Employee Engagement and Customer Connectedness. Second To None is publishing a four part blog-series expanding upon each of these Customer Experience pillars provided by the Temkin Group. This is part three, expanding on the role that Employee Engagement plays in curating a great Customer Experience. Thank you to the authors of the report and the Temkin Group for providing this material free to the public, you can access their report by clicking here.
To be a Customer Experience leader a brand must centralize the customer and their desires throughout all facets of the organization. By focusing on understanding and providing the desired value of the customer, brands can begin to become integral parts of their customers’ lives. However, one of the best ways to achieve this goal is by focusing not on the customers themselves, but on the employees who serve them. The Temkin Group lists employee engagement as one of its four core competencies to having a great Customer Experience because those employees that display effort and passion are usually responsible, and up to the challenge to provide the value that customers are hoping for. Employee engagement is integral to creating and maintaining a leading Customer Experience, but how can the leaders of an organization encourage this level of engagement?
In the report, Temkin and the other authors list the, “Five I’s of Employee Engagement,” as a guiding philosophy for brands looking to encourage higher engagement rates. Firstly, the report describes the effort that brand leaders must take to inform their employees about performance expectations. Without clear and consistent representations of these expectations, employees that are attempting to be engaged with the brand can unknowingly fall short. This teaching and training should take place immediately from the first day of hire, but should also be harkened back to periodically to maintain this employee performance throughout an individual’s time of employment.
Beyond informing employees, the report states that organizations need to be able to inspire their staff to make the necessary effort required to provide a great Customer Experience. To accomplish this, brand leaders must, “connect their employees to the organization’s visions and values.” Employees will not be engaged if they are not passionate about the product or service they are selling, so it is vital that organizations convince employees of the value they are providing, to help encourage mutually beneficial, not transactional, relationships with customers.
Temkin continues to describe a brand’s necessity to instruct employees, meaning that the main juice of this engagement responsibility should not lie solely on the employees themselves. One key way that brand leaders can share this engagement load is by established measurement processes. Programs like mystery shopping can help organizations get a clear picture of how individuals are performing, with legitimate examples that can be used to encourage future improvements. This clarity is essential to creating a company community based on clarity, accountability, and results.
The penultimate I of employee engagement relies on an organization’s ability to capture essential data, specifically ways to involve customers in the engagement process. While it is relatively obvious that gathering and analyzing customer feedback can improve the overall experience, brands will often ignore an extremely valuable set of data, and that is the opinion of the employees themselves. Involving employees, especially through channels like voice of employee feedback surveys, is a surefire way of capturing relevant information that can be used to make tangible changes in the everyday activities of a brand.
Finally, the Temkin Group revealed that organizations must incentivize high-performance to achieve the best employee engagement rates. Whether this takes shape as monetary prizes, enhanced benefits or simply company-wide recognition, if employees have a goal to strive for there is a higher chance they will be more engaged. It is human nature to be competitive, so by setting up friendly competition, brand leadership can encourage excellent employee engagement.
Once employees are engaged, it is likely that customers will be happier with the experience your brand provides. However, on top of employee engagement, customer opinions need to be monitored and represented throughout the customer journey. In the final part of this series, we will break down Temkin’s fourth core competency, customer connectedness.
Frequently Asked Questions About Employee Engagement and Customer Experience
How does employee engagement impact customer experience?
Engaged employees are more likely to provide excellent customer service, leading to higher customer satisfaction and loyalty.
What can businesses do to improve employee engagement?
Businesses can improve engagement by offering recognition, fostering a positive work culture, and providing opportunities for growth.
Why is employee engagement crucial for business success?
Engaged employees are more productive, motivated, and committed to enhancing the overall customer experience.
Second To None empowers customer-centric brands to deliver consistent, intentional and authentic consumer experiences.
We adeptly design and manage mystery shopping, compliance, engagement and voice of customer solutions grounded in strategic relevance, program integrity and actionable insights. Our solutions are developed on the basis of solid research and statistical science. We achieve success through a relentless focus on quality and innovation, consultative relationships and a talented team of professional associates.