Employee Engagement and Amazing Customer Experience

Earlier this month I posted an article about Employee Engagement Awareness on the Rise, and more recently I noted the release of a new book, Touchpoints – Improving Leadership and Employee Engagement by Douglas R. Conant (2011), CEO of Campbell Soup Company.

Recently I read the book Employees First, Customers Second by Vineet Nayar, published in 2010 which identifies the importance of employee engagement and the “value zone” – those in your organisation who add value to your customers and understand the importance of the customer experience delivery. And I have just finished Shep Hyken’s latest book, The Amazement Revolution, in which he provides a number of practical customer service strategies for building both customer and employee loyalty, backed by dozens of case studies.

Discussions continue to increase around the importance of employee engagement – having engaged employees, who are advocates of the products and services that your business provides.

In the past few months I have also been working with Clienteer Consulting, an independent consulting group, actively helping businesses to become more customer centric by identifying and meeting customer needs through employee engagement and strategic goal alignment.

Employee Engagement Growth

The benefits to be gained by customer centric organisations continue to be widely recognised. The capacity to deliver amazing customer experiences and achieve successful customer outcomes, can only be realised through employees who are truly engaged with the business, its products and services.

Employee Engagement Questions For Your Business

What strategies has your organisation adopted to improve customer experience?

Were they effective?

Did the customer experience strategies include employee engagement?

Please leave your comments below –

Return to: Customer Experience Services

Touchpoints – improving leadership and employee engagement

When I first saw a reference to the new book, TouchPoints by Douglas R. Conant (2011), CEO of Campbell Soup Company, I immediately thought of “Moments of Truth” by Jan Carlzon (1987), CEO of Scandinavian Airlines.

Touchpoints and Moments of Truth

I had always thought of touchpoints as being synonymous with moments of truth. Carlzon defined moments of truth as points of contact with customers. It now appears time to refine my understanding to differentiate between customer touchpoints and leadership touchpoints.

Carlzon wrote of leadership strategies in the customer-driven economy; flattening the pyramid and empowering the employees, and for leaders to ensure that the overall vision of the company is achieved.

Campbell writes of leadership strategies in the “interruption age”; improving employee engagement through leadership interactions. He notes that rather than managers perceiving daily interruptions as annoying, they should instead be managed as opportunities for improvement.

Informal interruptions should be seen as the most powerful and long-lasting opportunity for skilled leaders to promote the organisation’s values, purpose and agenda.

Read more about Doug Conant’s book, “TouchPoints – Creating Powerful Leadership Connections in the Smallest of Moments” here – https://conantleadership.com/books/touchpoints/

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Employee Engagement Awareness on the Rise

Is Employee Engagement Awareness on the Rise?

A review of current business articles highlighted a number of tweets, posts, and media articles over recent days and weeks that focus on employee engagement.

This comes on the back of the media hype over the increase in online consumer sales, with Australian retailers being told to lift their game and pass savings onto consumers and to actively compete with online offerings.

Disengagement versus Employee Engagement

The Human Resource Magazine recently noted that an “overwhelming 82 per cent of workers in Australia feel disengaged or disconnected at work” and that this “is costing Australian businesses billions of dollars in lost productivity”. And even LeasePlan Australia, one of the country’s leading vehicle leasing companies, noted in its latest “Roundtable” newsletter that worker disengagement amounts to a “global epidemic” and challenges its workers to become more engaged in service delivery.

These comments appear to be based on the results of a recent Gallup survey. Through its research over recent years, Gallup have developed a series of employee engagement indicators, linked to financial performance, to benchmark and grow employee engagement.

The Employee Engagement Challenge

The challenge is to ensure that employees are engaged with the business goals and strategies to a point where everything that they do positively contributes to successful customer outcomes. To implement employee engagement requires leadership from top management, effective communication and effective deployment of resources.

This article on the Sydney Morning Herald site questions whether managers really know what motivates their employees and suggests that employers need to treat their staff as their number one customer. It also quotes presenter and author, Ian Hutchinson as saying that “employees don’t leave organisations, they leave leaders”.

In the book “Employees First, Customers Second”, Vineet Nayar (2010) (https://www.vineetnayar.com/) narrates the journey he took in turning around HCLT by increasing transparency across the company to engage employees and empower them to be the catalysts for change and to create value for customers, the company and ultimately themselves.

All of this points to a tangible disconnect between staff motivation and company strategy. How can staff deliver consistent, quality service if they are not motivated and have not committed to the company strategy? For effective employee engagement, a key question to ask is whether management teams are failing in defining and communicating the company direction to their staff, or whether the wrong staff have been deployed within the company.

Key Employee Engagement Questions

How does your company rate in the employee engagement stakes?
Is a lack of employee engagement impacting your workplace?
What’s required to improve employee engagement?

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