At The Evolved Group, there are a number of CX Principles we follow to ensure we build successful CX programs. In my last post, I provided a high-level introduction to our approach. Essentially these principles are divided into four important groups – employees and customers, program owners, stakeholders and the leadership group.
Over the rest of this year, I will be talking about these principles, bringing them to life with case studies and discussing how to ensure each can be achieved.
In this post, I’ll take a closer look at the principles that underlie successful CX programs for employees and customers.
In the context of PeopleListening, our employee engagement solution, being responded to is a little trickier. Providing feedback anonymously is an important enabler to people feeling safe to express how they feel without fear of consequence. Organisations are implicitly power structures and for people in ‘lower level’ jobs, it is only natural to feel a sense of concern that one’s feedback if critical or negative could put their manager offside. That’s why we have controls in place to suppress feedback in small teams and obfuscate names when used in our feedback process. Nevertheless, providing feedback to your employer only makes sense if you believe they will do something with it – ‘they’ being either your manager, their manager or the organisation at large. We also have ‘danger words’ such as bully, bullying, harassment built into our Focus Words text analytics application. This enables us to spot people at risk and offer a suggestion to contact their HR team for support.
We can also surface generic feedback and suggestions and then connect it with all relevant feedback using our Action Connect tool. This closes the loop between managers and team leaders and creates clear accountability.
Employees & Customers
- Believe in its values
- Are responded to when in need
- Can easily give feedback
- Are asked relevant questions
- Feel their time is respected
Believe in its values
What exactly we mean by the values of an organisation can be hard to pin down, let alone define. The best and simplest explanation I have heard is simply… the things we value In the context of a successful CX program, customers must be valued. There is nothing more annoying when employees just don’t care about what the customer experience is: ‘hey mate, don’t ask me, I just work here’’. This can happen for various reasons, but mostly I’ve seen it happen either: a) when people lose sight of how their job relates to customer experiences or b) when they don’t feel empowered to make a difference. Part of the successful transformation we supported at Coles involved placing customer metrics on store KPIs for every Store Manager in Australia. As they say, measures drive behaviour. I’m pleased to say as a Coles shopper it really feels like people care when you are in a store. On the other hand, I’ve delivered programs in the past where the CX feedback has been given about as much attention as the wallpaper. Simply, when employees value customers, great things happen.Are responded to when in need
A best practice CX program has a defined red flag process where instances of customer dissatisfaction automatically trigger a resolution process through support channels. For customers, the surprise and delight arising when someone follows up on their feedback is alone a way to enhance the relationship. This is CX at its best and generates clear ROI from the program.As an example, this is our case manager application showing how we identify and track resolution opportunities based on language score scores.
