Your Customer Service Problem Isn’t A Customer Service …

A few years ago, one of our team members came down with a big health problem—a splitting headache that just wouldn’t let up. She visited several doctors, who recommended various treatments and medications to alleviate the pain, none of which worked. The pain was so intense that it made it difficult to carry out basic tasks, affecting both her personal and professional lives.

After a few days of nonstop pain, she decided to try a different route and visit a chiropractor. The chiropractor listened, asked probing questions about her headache, then examined her from head to toe—leading to a surprising discovery. As it turned out, our team member’s jaw was out of alignment. The chiropractor proceeded to treat the misalignment, and almost immediately, the pain started to evaporate. The headache, though disruptive, was not the core problem to be solved. Instead, it was a symptom of a problem somewhere else in her body, specifically her misaligned jaw.

Over the years, our agency has been asked by many a customer to help them solve a major brand-related headache—poor customer experience. In much the same way our team member’s headache turned out to be a symptom rather than a root cause, we found in each and every one of these client engagements that the poor customer experience was a symptom of a much bigger problem—poor employee engagement. It wasn’t that the employees of these companies didn’t know what great customer experience looked, smelled, and tasted . The problem was that they didn’t care enough to deliver that level of service.

The link between employee engagement and customer experience

When it comes to customer experience delivery, engaged employees will always outperform disengaged ones. As Timothy R. Clark, an author and organizational consultant, rightly notes, “Highly engaged employees make the customer experience. Disengaged employees break it.”

There is significant data to back up this claim. Research by Gallup showed that teams scoring in the top quartile on employee engagement enjoyed 10% higher customer loyalty/engagement. And research conducted by the Institute of Customer Service found that every 1% improvement in employee engagement leads to a 0.41 point increase in Customer Satisfaction Index scores. Based on these insights, it is clear that poor customer experience is the headache, while poor employee engagement is the misaligned jaw that needs to be treated.

Treat the cause, not just the symptom

I’ve spent nearly 20 years helping clients build brands that are loved by their employees and customers (in that order). Over that time, I’ve observed frustrated senior leaders with the best intentions trying to improve their poor customer experience delivery by commissioning customer service training, without doing anything about the actual cause of their subpar customer experience. If you want to get rid of the headache of poor customer experience, you have to treat the cause—not just the symptom. This means developing a sturdy employee engagement program that addresses the issue of poor engagement head-on.

Here are the steps I recommend my senior leadership clients take to elevate employee engagement to the same level of importance as other internal programs designed to strengthen organizational performance and ultimately deliver better business outcomes.

1. Make employee engagement a strategic priority

The first step in elevating the importance of employee engagement in your workplace is to make it a strategic priority rather than a “nice to have.” If customer experience is important enough to be discussed at senior leadership meetings or in the boardroom, so is employee engagement. If you don’t track employee engagement scores across the workplace, start doing so—today!

Make improving employee engagement scores a permanent agenda item for your senior leadership or board meetings. Begin treating it as a nonnegotiable priority, giving it the same discipline, attention, and urgency as any other core business metric.

2. Form your engagement unit and assign accountability

Your next step should be to form a team of experts with the skill sets needed to improve your employee engagement, and hold them accountable for doing so.

In modern workplaces, the responsibility of developing a culture where employees are highly engaged lies with Human Resources. However, some companies choose to form an employee engagement team that sits outside of HR on the organizational chart, while others may hire a specialized third-party employee engagement agency to do the heavy lifting. No matter which option you run with, hold your engagement team accountable by setting and documenting clear employee engagement goals, metrics, and key performance indicators for that team to aim for.

3. Specify desired outcomes

The most effective employee engagement programs are specific and measurable. Be sure to clearly articulate and document your employee engagement program’s goals, objectives, and success metrics so that your employee engagement team is aware of what they should be aiming for and how you define success.

4. Let employees cocreate your employee engagement programs

One of the biggest mistakes organizations make is designing employee engagement programs for employees rather than with employees. In doing so, they risk investing time, energy, money, and other resources in programs that don’t address the workplace issues employees actually care about. If employee engagement is the cumulative result of the experiences employees have within the workplace, then employees themselves are uniquely qualified to help identify what is working, what is not, and what needs to change in the workplace. 

Savvy business leaders involve their employees in the design, implementation, and evaluation of engagement initiatives. Empowering employees to cocreate your engagement programs increases the lihood that employees will embrace those programs and that they’ll make a positive impact on the workplace environment.

5. Measure, monitor & refine

Chances are that as your engagement unit builds out your employee engagement programs, they’ll make some mistakes along the way. Be patient with your engagement team, and accept that some elements of your engagement programs may initially fall short of their desired impact.

With this in mind, be prepared to measure and monitor your employee engagement programs so you can refine and fine-tune them and, in the long run, develop programs that best fit your unique employee engagement needs.

Excellent customer experiences start with excellent employee experiences

If you have a customer experience headache, remember that poor customer experience is a symptom. If you want to eliminate the headache, you need to treat the cause—not just the symptom.

Invest resources in developing programs that engage employees with the same vigor as you engage customers. Then, up with customer experience training that your newly engaged employees will appreciate and benefit from. Only then will you see an improvement in your organization’s level of customer experience.