employee engagement

The Power of Taking Ownership

cxsimplicityMarch 1, 2016Leave a Reply

Creating a culture of taking ownership when something goes wrong can transform an organization in terms of customer experience. I’m referring to taking ownership in two different ways:

Taking ownership for mistakes as a company.

Taking ownership for fixing a problem as an individual.

Both are important separately but even more powerful together. And both start at the top. Executives and high-level managers need to ditch the blame game and begin instilling the value of ownership down through the ranks. So what is the value?

Sets the tone for the organization. If the company as a whole sends a message to customers that they are taking ownership to fix a driver of dissatisfaction, it paves the way for taking individual ownership of issues and can begin to transform the culture.

Empowers employees. When it comes to great customer service, the need for employee empowerment is real. If an employee can own an issue and see it through to resolution, your customers don’t have to wait for the inevitable ball drop while bouncing between departments.

Increases job satisfaction. Empowerment is proven to lead to improved job satisfaction (one study here), and happy employees are an important piece in creating happy customers.

Builds customer trust. Customers trust an organization that listens to their complaint, owns the issue, and fixes it. You are developing loyalty by implementing this strategic approach to problem solving.

Encourages customer participation in improving the business. When customers can see that their voice is heard and acted upon, you are giving them a vested interest in making things better. They become engaged and willing to offer their input to improve your organization.

Inspire others in your organization by taking ownership of customer problems. The risk of not fixing issues is too great to waste time pointing fingers. Customers today expect you to acknowledge a bad experience and make it right to earn their loyalty. And doing so can have exponential benefits.

Breaking the Negative Feedback News

cxsimplicityFebruary 19, 2016Leave a Reply

Breaking the news of negative feedback to the responsible party can put you in an awkward position. You need to share the information to remedy the root cause, but the way you approach it might put some people on the defensive. What works?

Start with one-on-one discussions.

People tend to react better to bad customer experience news when they’re not called out in front of a large audience. Try approaching the manager of the team in which the problem lies and let him know about the feedback you received. Explain the situation from the customers perspective and ask if he can help you research it and come up with a game plan for resolution. This is best done over the phone or in person. The tone of emails can sometimes be misconstrued and result in denial and deflection. If you are responsible for providing read-outs on feedback to a larger audience, make sure you work with the manager to have an action plan ahead of time. That way when the negative feedback news comes up in the review, you can speak to the resolution that’s in the works. You also gain the manager’s trust by presenting yourself as part of the solution and not someone that just wants to point a finger.

Share a report on the relevant KPI.

If the manager isn’t quite convinced that the bit of negative feedback is accurate, then you can figure out a way to report on a KPI that reflects the feedback provided. Use that report in a follow-up discussion with the manager to show where they have an opportunity for improvement based on cold hard data.

Communicate the things you’re doing with other departments.

When you start to hear excuses as to why the customer responded with negative feedback (such as, “it’s someone else’s fault, not mine”), be sure to communicate with the manager that you’re also working with other departments to resolve the same issue. Talk through how each team impacts the process and outcome, and get his feedback on what he thinks the other teams could improve on. By engaging him in a discussion on how other teams can help the process (and ultimately help him), you can start to move into how he can reciprocate by helping the other teams as well. Seeing other colleagues involved in fixing the same issue can help provide some motivation.

Overall, being respectful about negative feedback goes a long way. Sometimes calling someone out is the only way to get a reaction, but I recommend that as a last resort. You want to build trust with your teams, collaborate, and ultimately, have a positive impact on the business. Think more along the lines of “Let’s talk about this and investigate the scenario” instead of “WHY DID YOU DO THAT?!” when sharing negative feedback. Try to remind everyone that fixing a source of negative feedback has exponential benefits.

Anticipate Dissatisfaction

cxsimplicityFebruary 18, 20161 Reply

Some things that make customers dissatisfied are intuitive, obvious things. If you ship them the wrong item or don’t show up on time to a service call, the customer is going to be unhappy. But there are other things you might not be aware of which is where your feedback process comes in handy. You can gain insight into the obvious and not so obvious drivers of customer frustration. Once you’re able to tune in to the current customer experience and compare that to customer needs and expectations, you can start anticipating areas of potential dissatisfaction. And once you can anticipate an event that causes dissatisfaction, you can start to set up internal alerts to get ahead of the process failure before it impacts your customer.

All areas of potential dissatisfaction are worth your focus and effort, but to get started, I suggest picking a problem for which you feel it would be relatively easy to set up an alert. Ultimately, you either want to focus on the problem that occurs with the highest frequency (allowing you to impact the most customers) or the problem that makes the customers most mad (biggest pain point). But to get your feet wet with a proactive approach to dissatisfaction, try one of your ‘low hanging fruit’ items. This way you can figure out the approach that fits best with your operations and culture.

What I mean by an alert is that you want to create some type of indicator with-in your process that triggers a notification to a person that will intervene when something is about to go wrong…BEFORE it goes wrong. Proactive quality control allows you to save the customer from experiencing the failure that will cause them to be dissatisfied.

Here’s an example. Say you have a business that schedules service appointments on a customer premise. Your organization has a process to notify customers of the details of their appointment because customers get frustrated when that information is not effectively communicated. You could set up an alert that is triggered to a customer service team if the appointment is 24 hours out and no notification has been sent. Then, your customer service team can take proactive action on notifying the customer before it’s too late. Another scenario: the service person assigned to help the customer is going to be late to the appointment. Can you anticipate that and take corrective action by sending someone else? Whatever the process may be, think about how you can (a) trigger the alert and (b) take corrective action.

Also, instead of reporting on the number of failures after the fact, you can report on the number of alerts that were triggered before a customer impacting error occurred. Both reports would show the same information and both would allow you to coach to the proper process, but proactive method does not allow the customer to become dissatisfied.

It may not always be feasible to correct a process so that the errors never occur, but with a proactive approach you can stand between your errors and the customer ensuring they have the best possible experience.

Engaging Teams with Positive Feedback

cxsimplicityFebruary 14, 2016Leave a Reply

One of the best things we get to do as customer experience professionals is share positive customer feedback to build employees up and generate enthusiasm for the work we do. Here are some ways to engage other functional groups in the organization with the positive feedback you receive from customers:

Share customer comments internally (via company newsletter, intranet, etc). It’s great for employees to see their names recognized company wide when complemented for a job well done.
Send customer comments to the employee and his supervisor via email. You can choose how ever many levels up you want to go when distributing a comment about an employee, but its great to let someone’s boss know that they’ve gone above and beyond. You get both the team member and the leader engaged this way.
Hand written thank you notes to employees. Thanking an employee with a handwritten note shows sincerity and can be really impactful, especially when sent by someone in a senior role.
Awards. You can implement awards based on monthly/quarterly/annual satisfaction scores. Money is usually a good motivator to get people engaged in trying to win an award. And everyone loves getting recognition for being the best at something.
Share customer comments externally. We know sharing customer comments externally is great for marketing, but it’s also great for internal motivation. When employees see feedback about their specific performance on the company website, it can be very powerful. You can share feedback on your website, newsletter, email campaigns, etc. And be sure to let your employees know that you’ve done so.

Whatever way you choose to share positive feedback, just remember not to keep it secret! Be consistent in making it well known to all and you’ll see everyone become increasingly excited about the customer experience.

Make the Case for Investing in CX

cxsimplicityFebruary 9, 2016Leave a Reply

Not every organization is in it to win it when it comes to customer experience. If you are dealing with folks that aren’t fully committed to the notion of a true customer experience program, you’ll have to spend some time building your case. High level executives want to see what kind of returns they could be getting from investing in customer experience improvements. I encourage you to step up to to challenge. Having the skills to prove the value of your initiatives will come in handy often. And it doesn’t have to be as complicated as you might think.

Calculate Customer Lifetime Value

You can use a measure of customer lifetime value in many ways as it relates to the customer experience. This number is your friend. Check out this infographic that can help you get started with a CLV calculation. If you’re just trying to get an understanding of the amount of revenue a customer could bring in over their lifetime, stick to the simple calculation. If you think you need to factor in profit margin for your audience, things might get a little more complicated, but definitely still doable.

Associate it with Churn

The next step is to associate your customer’s value with their likelihood to stay or leave. You can put together a simple model that takes your current churn rate and shows the lifetime value lost when those customers leave. Then, allow for toggling of churn rate. So if you are able to reduce the rate at which customers leave you, you can show the gains in revenue that can be realized. Alternatively, you can show the revenue your company is sacrificing by providing a bad experience.

If your business isn’t based on a subscriber or service model, you can investigate re-purchase rates. Then show that if you increase re-purchase rate by x (from an outstanding customer experience), then you’ll see the associated revenue growth of $y.

Lastly, if you want to take it a step further, investigate the drivers of churn. See if you can tell from your data whether a customer is more likely to churn after a certain circumstance (for example, a service call where a problem was not resolved, or an order that was improperly fulfilled). This is where you can really show the worth of improving the experience. If your organization could decrease the number of instances of the bad experience by x, it would result in a decrease in propensity to churn of z, and associated revenue of $y.

Consider Cost Reduction

Another great way to show the benefit of improving customer experience is by showing the potential for reduction in support costs. If customers don’t need to contact you to complain, how can you quantify that? Try to find out the cost associated with a customer support action (ex. phone call to the billing department or a chat with a support tech) and show what could be saved if investments were made to reduce those interactions.

Sell the Story

In the end, a wonderful customer experience value story can be told without killing yourself trying to master complex calculations with massive data sets. Get a grasp on some key financial metrics that can allow you to put a dollar estimate to what a dedicated customer experience program can accomplish and paint the picture for your audience by harping on all the benefits of satisfied customers: longer tenure, more positive word-of-mouth, less negative word-of-mouth, and so on.

Guess what? Other businesses have already done the work on finding statistics that support why investing in customer experience is important. Use them! A simple google search will turn up powerful results and stats that you can use to make your case. Here is an example from Zendesk. And Forrester has seemingly endless studies to support CX initiatives.

People rely on their peers and colleagues to vet a company prior to making a purchase making satisfied customers one of the most powerful marketing tools a company can have. Help your organization realize the growth potential in improving the customer experience.

CX Simplicity

Tag: employee engagement

The Power of Taking Ownership

Breaking the Negative Feedback News

Anticipate Dissatisfaction

Engaging Teams with Positive Feedback

Make the Case for Investing in CX