Presentation for the European Customer Experience World 2011. May 2011. London. Presentación, para el European Customer Experience World 2011. Mayo 2011. Londres.
Investment in The Coconut Industry by Nancy Cheruiyot
Employee experience.key insights for staging it right.
1. Employee Experience: Key insights for staging it right “ If you´re starting to have a new experiential approach within your customers and business model, you must extend this to your employees”
Good afternoon and welcome everybody. We´ll be exploring the employee side of the experience, wich normally it´s being underlooked. We must create the right platform that engages our workforce, wich will lead us to customer experience, in it´s full potential. It´s also about a real commitment with them, our value creation moments, our living brands. So let´s start this journey together .
We can´t keep on our isolated customer experience efforts just building on the customer side, we must extend the connection to our employees. In business we see people talking and talking, different kinds of talking . There´s a lot of pretending in the customer experience area, yes, the typical we or our, …to the media. But then the real message when the customer journey starts is another, and another of poor performing and no real commitment. If we commit to this, we must keep our promises and walk the talk. It´s a wonderful area to look and get inspired about, and the return on investment is clear.
So Customer and Employees are connected, ¿Do we encourage this connection?,¿Or we tend to build barriers instead?. ¿Do we provide them for what they ´re looking for?. Relevance, excitement, moving beyond satisfaction, and so on,… ¿Do we bring also innovations on this side?. Because we have a new employee profile, and it´s the Experience Based Employee(normally a Gen X or Y type), we must be aware of this. I encourage you to go and discuss this with your human resources department, do some research on this new set of skills and profile, and bring this into your recruitment process. Our customers have change so our employes have, and we can´t doing it the same way.
If we want to engage them, we must map also their journey along with the company. So they want our attention back, and we´ll have to bring some resources in that. In his best way, we must do this with their participation, in a collaborative way. And within a broaden map, we then will find different stories about the experience, according to cultural and lifestyle differences,and different roles also. Make it an intimate conversation , and ask them also what they want more to get about the company, his goals,… Turn this tool as an opportunity to : Reconnect, break some walls down and help set a new tone of the relationship.
Schakleton Consulting Group, has developed the Virtual Job Tryout, a innovative approach for smoothing the recruitment process. They intented to solve the problem of poor performance,in the recruitment process that we actually face in business. The tool allows your company to go beyond resumés, gather more insightful data, roleplay the candidate into the job from many views (operationally, attitudinally,….), and brands the whole process. On top of this, it´s also a tool that your future employees will value with his ease of use, and enrichment of the process that sends an important caring message to them. The message is that you care about talent acquisition, as much as you do of other important asset of your company.
We can build the “wow” thing for our employees also, we normally just thing on “wows” from the customer point of view.
When you start digging on this journey you´ll encounter yourself doubting about metrics and processes that don´t engage anymore. I want to offer you new thoughts about the rewarding system that you may take into account. And I will start with one question, ¿Why we don´t pay our employees according to the nº of meaningful connections that they create?. So here is also a twist in terms of productivity, but our touchpoints workforce should be considered more or less this way , as a portion of their salary.¿How we can install this ?. So we must define different levels of connections between a customer relationship, each one will come with a bonus(material or inmaterial) once the pretended level is achieved, and then we must encourage our team to scale the relationships to the top level. You can add some factors like the number of wowed moments, recovery especial bonus,…..With this simple new approach, we have started to have our people working for expanding the current customer experience. ¿isn´t this our ultimate goal?.
Pret a manger, the sandwich and casual snacking company, having installed the basics right in terms of employee experience, ranks good also in some key points that puts them aside of the competition. They are pretty good in profiling their employees and bringing value for them. They have also branded the employee experience, so it´s : Orquestrated, planned, structured,…And it´s aligned with the customer experience they intend to deliver. Keypoint : A well defined strategy, with a good implementation can make it also for you.
I want to share with you this easy tool in terms of thinking. This you can apply in building the employee experience but also when staging any customer experience. Make a description of the rational elements involved in a given situation/scenario/experience that you´re intending to analyze. Then try to thing of the same ones or related, from an emotional perspective. We tend to spread too many rational elements, and unbalance them compared with more emotional elements, that should prevale. That also applies in terms of language, behaviour,……
We can get a lot of help when having our people , contributing in the experience delivery. We can do this by deploying several initiatives, one of this can be the creation of a Touchpoint Commitee, where several or one employee will “own” the experience of this touchpoint and discuss different issues for enhancing it. This commitee can work on : Putting customer insights into action,discuss the customer interface,…..Then the commitee will be involved in the overall experience gathering, led by the customer experience manager,where they will exchange findings,…