Thought Leadership

Customers expect consistency. If these expectations aren’t met, a hostile relationship can occur between a customer and brand. Meeting expectations consistently, across all platforms and channels is, therefore, key to driving trust and loyalty with customers.

Understanding Expectations

Pearl-Plaza’s 2017 CX Trends Report highlights that brand and customer perceptions are beginning to align more closely in some areas, such as personalisation and feedback responses. However, it also reveals some significant disconnects. One such disconnect is that brands do not fully understand customer expectations, or the positive and negative emotions that can arise from meeting, or breaking, those expectations.

Our Trends Report shows that satisfaction tops the list of emotions customers associate with brands with which they feel most loyal. At the end of the day, customers aren’t asking for much – they want the brand’s promise to be delivered and, most importantly, they want to be satisfied.

Alignment

A company may have multiple platforms of communication with its customers. On a daily basis customers may interact with a company through different media channels, different devices and even through visiting brick and mortar locations. Whilst these channels are all different, customers conceive a company as a single entity. If they have a bad experience with one channel, this could impact their experience with the wider business. No matter how many channels a company has to communicate with its customers, if there is no alignment between these channels, the overall experience is diminished.

Before brands divert resources in an attempt to delight customers, they must master alignment of both promises and expectation. The key is in knowing what customers want from each brand touchpoint, using CX data, and ensuring the brand promise is being delivered accordingly.

In addition, with many companies looking to use customer experience as an important differentiator, getting every employee on the same page should be a top priority. Employee alignment is key in order for this to happen. Brands need to foster an environment where all employees are focussed on helping customers succeed if they are to create a consistent experience regardless of product, location, channel or platform.

Building trust with your customers

The ultimate goal of most companies is to build trust with customers (as trust can lead to loyalty). Trust, however, doesn’t just happen – it must be earned through a series of good experiences, over time.

Understanding customer expectations is just the starting point for most companies. Aligning the brand promise and messaging comes next. Then, and only then, can a company start to build customer trust.

As long as there are customers, there will always be issues, complaints, and disagreements.

In fact, nearly every morning’s news report brings another example of a self-proclaimed “customer-centric” company failing—and shockingly, sometimes injuring—its customers.

Let’s be honest: Pleasing every customer, every time—while an admirable goal—is simply not possible. But failing to meet customer expectations doesn’t have to be all bad. In fact, it’s an opportunity to not only redeem the customer relationship, but—when handled with skill—also significantly improve it. There’s another, nearly-untapped benefit: It’s a chance to empower employees to take greater ownership of the customer experience (CX) and increase their own engagement in the process.

Customer complaints typically end one of two ways: They’re either resolved satisfactorily…or they’re not. When resolved successfully, customers are turned into loyal brand advocates while employees receive an enhanced sense of self-efficacy, a more positive CX orientation, and experience higher levels of motivation, confidence, and morale. However, a lack of resolution can drive customer churn and cause emotional exhaustion, frustration, and disengagement for employees over time.

A few years ago, we were working with the contact center of a leading financial services company and quickly identified an increase in the number of customers calling to check on the arrival statuses of their new credit cards. In an attempt to quell customer concerns over potentially lost or stolen cards, the company’s service agents acted quickly to void the original cards and ship new cards—overnight—to anxious customers. They were handling the situation exactly how they had been trained.

Taking additional calls, issuing new cards, and utilizing expedited shipping were additional expenses for the company—and were ultimately not addressing the root of customer concerns. In fact, immediately shipping a new card perpetuated the perception that the original card had been lost or stolen, and customer satisfaction continued to lag.

Aside from salvaging individual customer relationships, there’s much more to be gained from customer complaints. The one-on-one interaction between an employee and a customer is a unique, individualized, and often emotionally charged experience. And it turns out employees have a lot to say about it. In fact, one Pearl-Plaza study found that 33% of employee engagement surveys contain feedback relating to an aspect of the customer experience. Frontline staff have a range of perspectives on the multitude of factors influencing the customer experience that individual departments or leaders simply cannot know. But collecting the intelligence that comes from this interaction—in a systematic, in-the-moment way—is rarely accomplished.

Back to the financial services company…Ultimately, it came down to trust. From the customer’s perspective: You sent me a new card, but what happened to my original? Why didn’t you do enough to protect my personal information and finances in the first place? However, in actuality, cards are very rarely lost or stolen in transit.

Using feedback collected from call center staff—both supervisors and agents—the company implemented new protocols to reinforce customer trust. It sent regular text and email tracking updates for cards. It retrained agents to place a special emphasis on the shipping window/anticipated delivery date of the original card and coached them to reiterate that timeframe to customers who called prior to the deadline. Not only did the company see a cumulative savings of approximately $3.5 million in a single year, but it increased customer satisfaction, trust—and employee moral.

How this particular organization handled these customer complaints said a lot about its culture. It listened to its customers and employees, empathized with the pain points of the customer experience, and worked together across the enterprise to take action. Most importantly, it promoted a culture where people felt empowered to speak up because they knew that the company had their backs.

How customer complaints are handled is the ultimate test of your company’s culture. It’s a microcosm of how your company thinks, feels, behaves, and adjusts. When opportunities present themselves, how do you respond? Are you reactive or proactive? What sorts of relationships do you have with your customers? Are you able to identify areas for improvement, notify key stakeholders, and take action? Do you have clear resolution practices that address specific complaints but surface broader insights? And most importantly, do your employees receive the training, support, and guidance they need to effectively solve customer concerns with genuine care?

By empowering your employees to have a voice in CX, and equipping them with the necessary tools to not only appease—but truly please—customers, everybody wins.

In my last article, I discussed how CX will ensure that brands are able to adapt to changing customer requirements in order to stay ahead of the competition. In part two of this article, I will cover why CX strategy cannot exist in a bubble and must continuously reflect the global environment, hopes, and innovative solutions that affect us all. 

Economic, Political, and Social Factors Will Disrupt

In the UK, we are facing a series of challenges that may easily disrupt the flow towards better, more consistent experiences for customers. Let’s ignore what Brexit may do in the long term to human resource. In the short term, we know how inflation—affecting both food and fuel—changes shopping habits.

Recent articles have suggested that rising petrol prices will make customers adapt more of a convenience approach as we reduce car journeys in order to cope. However, history suggests that it may again be the high street stores that most suffer. Towards the end of the last decade, in order to counter the rising trend away from out of town shopping, the Big Four supermarkets (Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury’s, and Morrisons) pushed out more money off coupons and price offers on fuel in their own forecourts. Customers were therefore compelled to take advantage of the cheaper fuel available there, and the convenience channel suffered. Customers also moved back to larger trolley shops, and the “all under one roof” grocery experience. The likes of Tesco and Asda saw their non-food category shares grow as a result.

With rising costs and reduced available cash forecasted in 2017, value for money will become more important as priorities are juggled. This should not be mistaken for a call for more price wars and risk a race to the bottom. Brands need to clearly set out their customer promise, making customers recognise that the brand cares about the experiences that they offer, and deliver against these expectations flawlessly.

There is a key role for CX to support in adapting to these times. When businesses struggle costs come under pressure, including the potential investment in customer experience solutions. It will be even more important to deliver clear ROI linked to their programmes, as well as setting out the longer-term strategic role to be realised. The brands that continue to invest and innovate will be the longer-term winners. CX sustains businesses.

Consumer Trends and the Demand to Take Responsibility

We began 2017 with a series of high profile stands against positions that many people felt uncomfortable. The movement, #DeleteUBER, showed the power that bad publicity could have on any business, with 200,000 customers deleting the app in the midst of the social noise generated around the first US travel ban. We subsequently saw different North American, but also internationally-focused brands, setting out their position and their values. VF Corp stated that they are a “company committed to inclusion”, where “diversity—among our people, our brands, and our consumers—is a source of competitive strength and organizational pride”. Levi’s reminded us all that Levi Strauss himself was an “immigrant”, and declared “empathy, originality, integrity, and courage are perhaps even more meaningful today than they were 163 years ago.”

Both brands were no doubt clear that being honest about what you stand for could be as important as what you do in the eyes of the customer. There are multiple ways in which a customer builds up an experience of a brand, and how you respond to external challenges is one of them. In a climate where the levels of trust are in such short supply, it pays to stand out for doing the right thing. Delivering great experiences, not just products, will count more in this new world.

Tackle 2017 with a Clear Purpose

In summary, trust needs to be gained, built, and retained by brands and CX can help pick up concerns quickly—and at a robust volume. Another clear role for the CX industry is to unearth the stories that show how worldviews are changing and allow businesses to act.

We know that to be successful brands need to focus on setting positive and long-term goals for their customer experience strategy. There need to be regular reminders of the progress being made against these objectives at a senior level to ensure focus and how the investment in the customer has delivered results that overshadow the investment involved.

CX is not only an operational solution, but should strategically support the brand purpose. An attitude of doing the right thing in order to build a sustainable, healthy, safe, and inclusive future should be considered a moral and commercial imperative for brands.

It is likely that you already know that customer experience (CX) is important. CX has evolved rapidly in the past few years to become an established part of the way that businesses plan and implement change to achieve their organizational and financial objectives.

Where CX was once essentially a worthy and modern alternative to measuring internal standards through mystery shoppers, improving customer experience is now a strategic and commercial imperative across most leading businesses. This is true across nearly all sectors, channels, and industries. CX now has a readily recognised purpose.

The CX industry cannot afford to stand still. CX leaders need to continually push the boundaries of CX further to ensure its long-term relevance. These messages, ideas, and solutions need to be delivered in the context of the changing realities of our age; including technological, economical, and even political shifts.

In the next two articles, I will break down how to keep your brand relevant in the ever-changing world of CX into two parts:

• Part One: Adapting to Changing Customer Requirements to Stay Ahead of the Competition
• Part Two: Building a CX Strategy to Reflect Global Trends

Omnichannel Is Changing the Way We Shop

Year-on-year footfall on the high street is falling, with shoppers’ visits to retail stores declining every year. This trend is down to the increased convenience and improvement in the experiences delivered through digital. There are other economic and social factors behind this fall in numbers that we need to bear in mind.

In the past year we have seen digital retailers open up physical locations (e.g., Made.com, Missguided, and Amazon Go) as companies look to tap into the benefits of offering a full omnichannel experience. They recognise that in order to drive loyalty and sales they need to consider opening up a phygital (physical and digital) offering, as well as the obvious PR in doing something new. Evidence that customers who engage with more than one channel spend an average of 4% more on every shopping occasion in the store and 10% more online than single-channel customers has to be a key incentive to expand across channels. Pearl-Plaza also conducted a retail study recently, which reinforced this finding.

Omnichannel traffic is more typically weighted towards brands facilitating a greater proportion of online experiences for their customers, even if the purchase is ultimately made in a physical location. Webrooming (i.e., researching products online) especially amongst millennials is a behaviour that has challenged typical journey mapping tactics and entrenched department silos.

There are signs that the collaborative message is landing. We have recently seen Adidas launch an online tour of their flagship store in Stockholm, filmed with a 360-degree camera to create a virtual store experience (and aid the pre store process). Gap has gone further and created an augmented reality fitting room so that customers can “try clothes on” at home.

We can also recognise a blending process where investment is being made to bring the online benefits of ease and personalisation into stores, hotels, and restaurants. Our 2017 global CX Trends Report explored the types and importance of personalisation. From Inamo (London restaurant) where the whole ordering experience is delivered through an in-store tablet through to the trial of facial recognition technology in KFC China to predict customer orders; boundaries are being tested. In retail, we have seen a pursuit of “retailtainment” where stores are reworked as experiential spaces, with the concept of the Hackett Gin Bar in London especially capturing my own imagination (if not yet my spend).

In-store personalisation still remains a challenge even with the most optimised customer relationship management (CRM) systems in place. When one of the best examples of delivering a personal experience is Topshop’s pop-up store on Oxford Street selling Hello Kitty gear with the shopper’s name added on, you have to realise how far we still need to go to get anywhere near the level of sophistication found on the web. 

Technology Accelerates

The past 12 months have delivered fresh excitement in how technology is changing the ways we deliver, train, and share experiences. Amazon Echo stands out as the poster child for the opportunities in artificial intelligence (AI), and rightly has created a lot of buzz. Early adoption does, however, often come hand in hand with risk. For example, the largest supplier of broadband in the UK (BT) regularly struggles to connect to Echo has damaged the initial excitement of customers getting their hands on this new kit and has led to real frustration.

To appear innovative and allow funds to be redistributed to where it is most needed, AI is the way to go. The risk of not going there is probably greater than the investment required in taking the leap. Failure of USA Hearing Care businesses, who did not adopt a 3D approach to manufacturing, to survive has to be a clear warning that failure to quickly adapt to new technologies can be terminal.

Starbucks have been cited as a victim of their own success in tackling the need to provide joined up omnichannel experiences. Mobile pre-orders were reportedly causing stores to struggle, causing slower service—and unhappy customers. Transactions in the USA dropped due to the popularity of their order-and-pay app causing unforeseen strain on the process in store, allied to a move away from traditional malls.

Sometimes there may be the need to turn down the dial on technology. Mistakes will be made, and demand may at times outweigh the capability to cope. Issues will need to be resolved quickly, and we should expect the world to become more “artificial” over the next decade. CX can help us understand at what point technology is seen as an experience enabler ahead of more traditional touchpoints. In the meantime, CX offers a great measurement of a brand’s ability to maintain satisfaction levels whilst evaluating trials of new and innovative kits.

To differentiate themselves as great places to work, companies are thinking further outside the box than ever. While always-full snack closets, company game rooms, and offices that double as doggy day care are attractive perks, do they—and other employee engagement efforts—truly deliver the return on employee loyalty companies are looking for?

It’s no secret that engaged employees are more productive: less likely to spend a good portion of the day scrolling through their Facebook feed, or worse, job hunting on LinkedIn. They’re also much more likely to provide a better experience to your customers, and this less/more combination both saves and makes your business more money. But what leads to the type of sustained engagement that maps to positive bottom-line outcomes? Is it competitive pay, creative benefits, and room for professional growth? The opportunity for a positive work/life balance? Being equipped with the tools needed to do the job effectively?

Of course, all these factors matter immensely in the employee engagement formula. But years of research and working with some of the world’s leading brands has led me to a surefire way to ensure your employees deliver for you and, in turn, your customers: make sure they know they are valued.  

Notice I didn’t say make them feel valued.

Think about your friends and family. How do you know they value you? In my experience, it comes from trust, respect, and being asked for my input or opinion on important issues. And while the employer/employee relationship is different in many ways, the general idea is the same: If you want your employees to know they are valued, you have to actually demonstrate—consistently—that you value them. And a good place to start is asking for their honest ideas on how to deliver a better customer experience (as well as what’s preventing them from doing so).

Customer experience is more than a soup de jour. It’s a data-backed way to outpace your competitors. The employee’s perspective on improving the brand’s delivery of customer experience—known as Voice of the Employee (VoE)—empowers employees to take ownership of CX outcomes. And when you ask employees for their advice on improving CX—at established touchpoints and intervals, through ad hoc invites and “always-open” portals—and then act on that advice, they know they’re trusted, respected, and valued. They know this because you have made them part of the solution.

While the traditional mentality focused on creating the right working environment for employees, this new model takes a collaborative approach to problem solving and innovation, asking “What can we do together…and how?” It moves away from asking employees if they feel valued to ensuring value is manifest through action. It’s about getting to a point where you don’t have to ask—because you know. It’s not just one-time feedback; it’s the beginning of an ongoing conversation.

With technology, what was once a complicated, siloed, and often ineffective web of processes can now be streamlined and expedited. Sophisticated listening tools allow companies to systematically collect and run complex analyses on both customer and employee feedback, surfacing correlations and trends, and identifying both failures and successes. Tech can even automate some tasks for employees: prioritizing cases, routing customers to the places and people where they can get the right answers, and serving up content personalized to their preferences. Automated systems can also arm your front line with in-the-moment intelligence, empowering them to have the most effective interactions possible. And with processes like machine learning and artificial intelligence built into some of the more innovative solutions, these systems get smarter and even more effective over time. In essence, technology is a value-building tool that empowers employees to be your greatest CX advocates.

The result: Employees are providing more value to your customers and your brand, and they are more successful in their roles. In other words, you are helping them be—not just feel—more valuable.

While a number of aspects factor into employee engagement, VoE goes beyond salary, benefits, and foosball tables. It gives your employees a permanent seat at the decision-making table. By making employees part of the solution, companies are rewarded with not only a passionate, empowered workforce, but also new ideas and insights even their customers can’t provide.

Inspired. Proud. Motivated to be even better. The Pearl-Plaza team is still taking in the full impact of a report recently released by an independent research firm in which we were cited as a Leader, received the highest possible score in 10 criteria for our Current Offering, and achieved the top ranking for Strategy.  

And beyond all of good news for our company and clients, the report also contains some very insightful findings that will help every customer experience (CX) practitioner better understand the landscape they’re working within, as well as the opportunities.

The report is titled The Forrester Wave™: Customer Feedback Management Platforms, Q2 2017. In addition to exploring the similarities and differences between top technology providers, Forrester makes clear the connections between Voice of the Customer (VoC) programs and Customer Feedback Management (CFM) platforms, as well as the role each play in supporting organizations’ CX initiatives.

How “VoC” Relates to “CFM”

According to Forrester, there are four distinct VoC tasks:

• Listen: Directly solicit and gather unsolicited feedback from multiple sources
• Interpret: Analyze feedback, create dashboards and reports; automatically route
• Act: Alert on action, manage cases, prioritize and prescribe
• Monitor: Track change in perception over time; measure results of VoC-initiated activities

CFM platforms play the important role of supporting CX professionals in managing the complexity of their VoC programs by centralizing and automating these tasks.

Untapped Potential

While many companies have at least a rudimentary VoC program in place, few are leveraging technology to its full potential, leaving money—and opportunity—on the table. In the report, Forrester cites the following findings:

• Only 42% of companies use one ore more technology solutions to support their VoC program.
• Brands that buy CFM platform solutions are mostly first-time buyers.
• Although CFM platforms have functionality to serve all VoC tasks, just 19% of companies use a CFM vendor to solicit feedback, and only 5% of all companies use the same CFM provider for the majority of other tasks.

So how can a company that wants to improve its VoC efforts identify the right CFM provider?

“Providers that Matter”

Forrester has done a lot of important work for you in the report, in which analysts takes a very comprehensive look at state of the CFM platform market and providers within it. The first thing they did was conduct primary research to develop a list of vendors that met the criteria for further evaluation.

Forrester winnowed the consideration set down to the “10 providers that matter” based on 1) product fit, 2) client success, and 3) Forrester client demand. Analysts then began the months-long process of surveying each vendor on their capabilities and validating capabilities through product demonstrations.

Client references played a large role in Forrester’s process. Analysts conducted three client phone interviews per provider, and fielded a survey among 60 client references.   

The result of these monumental efforts is a comprehensive evaluation of the top CFM vendors, including their strengths and weaknesses.

Partnership is Key

A key takeaway from the report was that not only are organizations looking for great technology, but they also need a true business partner—not just a vendor—to navigate the constantly changing CX landscape:

“The CFM market is growing because more CX professionals want a technology platform that automates and centralizes essential VoC activities. CX pros are also looking for a steady and close relationship with a provider that acts as an extended part of their team and helps evolve their VoC program.”

To read more about CFM and how managing and automating the complexities of your VoC efforts can create high-value relationships with your customers, download the free report.

For over 500 years, scholars and art historians have debated whether or not the woman in the Mona Lisa is smiling. Detailed analysis suggests that from certain angles and distances, the lady appears to be smiling; from others, the smile appears to have vanished—an effect achieved by using a combination of color and shading to create an optical illusion around her mouth.

If only every company analyzed its customers’ feedback—and emotions—with such fervor.

When companies focus on scores alone they fail to understand and bring context to the emotions and inherent richness expressed by their customers. Consider this: If art connoisseurs evaluated paintings the way many CX analysts evaluate results, they would note that the Mona Lisa measures two-and-a-half feet by one-and-three-quarter feet, was painted using oil by Leonardo da Vinci in 1503, and depicts a woman—Lisa Gherardini. There would be no discussion about her smile.

Yet, brands routinely make business decisions based on information not much more nuanced than this. They regularly overlook the emotions—joy, pain, or disgust, to name a few—communicated by customers in “human” data from open-ended comments, social reviews, etc.—hiding behind excuses such as “it’s too difficult to measure.”

With consumers so willing to tell companies how they feel—and why—why do many brands miss the mark so badly when it comes to customer experience?

Pearl-Plaza’s annual CX Trends Report delved into how both consumers and CX practitioners view the role of emotion in customer experiences and brand loyalty. We gave respondents a list of emotions and asked them to select which one they associated most strongly with great customer experiences. The overwhelming response? Satisfied. We also asked customers which emotion they associated with the brands they are loyal to. The answer, yet again, was satisfied.

So let’s get this straight: Can the relatively mild emotion of satisfied (not stronger emotions, like delighted or entertained) not only be used to describe great experiences, but also drive customers toward brand loyalty? Maybe satisfied is good enough—great, even—and customers don’t need to feel anything more to become loyal.

We then asked consumers to describe, in detail, the why behind their emotions—to give us a qualitative view into their stated satisfaction (or whichever emotion they chose). Within this unstructured, human data, we found a layered and infinitely more valuable story. Customers are very happy and feel bonded to brands when their expectations are consistently met. And those expectations are quite basic. Here’s one example from a Danish consumer:  “They had what I was looking for.”

Any CX analysis that ends with the quantitative data is missing important details—the emotional context—as well as the why of a customer’s experience. Only by including the human, unstructured data will analysts surface a much deeper intelligence—because just like the Mona Lisa, there’s so much more meaning than a quantitative description can ever capture.

The relationship between consumers and brands is no longer a mere transfer of goods or services for monetary exchange. Long gone are the days where consumers make a purchase on a whim. Today, they conduct extensive online research and have nearly endless options. They also have more information and more ways to interact with brands than ever before. These factors, combined with cultural shifts, find consumers approaching brand interactions much more like a relationship than a transaction.

This personal connection has created a kind of reciprocity between consumers and brands. And where a healthy back-and-forth exists, trust grows. Pearl-Plaza’s 2017 CX Trends Report revealed the impact this new perspective has on the brand-consumer relationship, including both the real risks and opportunities.

We asked 20,000 consumers and 10,000 CX professional across Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand to tell us which emotion they associate most strongly with a negative customer experience. The findings showed a major disconnect between what brands believe and what consumers feel.

Consumers Don’t Have Unreasonable Expectations

The top emotions consumers reported feeling when they had a bad experience were “disappointment,” which implies they had an expectation which the brand failed to meet—or in relationship terms, they broke a promise.

In the Age of the Customer, it’s easy to chalk this up to rising, and perhaps even unreasonable expectations, but that’s not the story the unstructured feedback told; just the opposite in fact. A Danish consumer’s comment is representative of what we heard from satisfied consumers across geographies: “They had what I was looking for.”

So because consumers feel like they’re in a relationship with brands, and their expectations are reasonable, when those expectations are not met, strong negative emotions emerge.

The Impact of Anger

What brands do not seem to comprehend is the intensity of these negative emotions. In fact, the study found that consumers were nearly twice as likely as brands to associate anger with negative experiences.

The qualitative data around bad brand experiences was even more definitive. A Finnish consumer reported feeling “rage, disappointment and loathing,” and a consumer from Sweden claimed to have “lost all trust in the brand.”

So how do brands reduce or prevent these kinds of feelings?

Reducing Negative Emotions

When attempting to reduce negative emotions and poor consumer experiences, it is imperative that brands do two things:

1)    Align the brand promise with customer expectations.

2)    Reliably deliver on that promise.

This may sound like an oversimplification, however it’s surprising how many companies still overshoot, or miss the mark completely.

Emotion plays a fundamental role in any relationship, and by understanding the power emotion holds—and taking action to positively influence emotion—brands will create long-lasting, reciprocal relationships with their customers.

Earlier this month, Pearl-Plaza released our 2017 CX Trends Report. The objective of this annual exercise is to examine various areas of customer experience (CX) from both consumer and brand perspectives to determine where these groups are aligned, and where there are disconnects.

Last week we held a webinar, during which my colleague James Bolle, who heads up our UK office, and I went into detail surrounding some of the report’s findings. We also talked about what these findings mean for CX practitioners, and how they can put those learnings into action inside of their organizations.

One of the areas we touched on briefly was the opportunity brands have to move beyond reaction — simply giving customers what they say they want — to giving customers what they truly need.

I referred to a personal experience I had with the online furniture brand, Wayfair. I had ordered a new bed for my six-year-old daughter. When it arrived, in pieces and ready to assemble, the box had been damaged. And while the bed itself was unscathed, most of the hardware to assemble the bed was either missing or strewn between the curb and my front door.

I called customer support and was greeted by a friendly and helpful agent. He called me by name, which means Wayfair has put in the effort on the back end to connect customer information and make it available to their front line service team. Good first step. I explained my problem and he immediately agreed to ship the new parts to my home at no charge. And while I was appreciative of his quick and cordial response, he must have heard the frustration I was still feeling in my voice. He followed up in fast order with another fix: In addition to expediting shipment of the new nuts and bolts, he told me that I could also visit my local store, purchase whatever hardware I needed, and submit the receipts for immediate reimbursal.

This may not sound groundbreaking, but it was for me. This agent, and the entire machine Wayfair has created to support him, was prepared to understand not just what I said I wanted (new hardware), but to make possible what I needed — to assemble my daughter’s bed that afternoon so she could sleep in it that night.

There’s a quote attributed to Henry Ford that goes like this: “If I would have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Whether or not Ford actually vocalized this specific sentiment, there’s an important lessons for CX practitioners.

First, listen. In this case, customers wanted faster horses. The next step is to ask why. Why did customers say they wanted faster horses? Because they wanted to get from point A to point B faster. Ford’s response: the automobile. He heard what customers needed, and with a groundbreaking innovation, gave them what they needed. And he solved their problem better than they knew how to imagine.

The CX Trends Report reinforced the need for companies to deliver not simply on their brand promise, but on customer expectations. What I expected from Wayfair was a bed in which my daughter could sleep. But within my expectation was also a time frame. Wayfair had promised my bed would be delivered on a specific day. I had planned around that promise, getting rid of my daughter’s old bed and creating an expectation with her that her new bed would be ready on a specific day.

Wayfair has gone to the effort to understand the personal — and emotionally-charged — aspect of my expectations. I had invested a lot in their promise. And just as our trends study confirmed, because the company met my expectations, I was both satisfied with the transaction, and I am now a loyal customer and advocate.
Yes, it’s difficult to align an organization’s culture, technology, and processes to get it right with your customers. But not only is it possible, it’s happening. For those brands still grappling with the myriad of real challenges, there is simply too much evidence to let the difficulties stand in your way.

If an employee offers a suggestion on how to improve your business and no one is there to hear it, does it even make a sound? It may make noise, but one thing is for certain—it won’t make a positive impact on your customer experience.

First, a quick primer on terms. Employee engagement and related feedback primarily refer to employees’ experiences with their jobs, colleagues, pay, benefits, etc. Voice of Employee (VoE) refers to feedback employees give a company regarding the customer experience. Sometimes VoE feedback is mingled with employee engagement feedback. Some companies even ask employees about their ideas on how to improve the customer experience. Unfortunately, those cases are rare.

With the introduction of the service-profit chain theory more than a decade ago, companies began to understand the strong connection employee engagement levels have on the success of their business. Today, 71 percent of businesses rank employee engagement as “very important” in achieving overall organizational success. Sixty-six percent of CX professionals also say employees are the top source of actionable insights about their organization’s customer experience.

It’s not that businesses do not see the value of employees’ perspectives feedback. It’s that, in a time when brands will do almost anything to please customers, it’s surprising how many companies fail to solicit, value and act on Voice of Employee feedback.

Brands have stepped up their customer listening, or Voice of Customer (VoC) efforts significantly. And while incredibly valuable, even essential, VoC programs only collect one perspective of customer-to-brand interactions. Employees have an insider-view of the business as well as direct connections to the customer.
The next opportunity for companies is to more closely link these two essential stakeholders and their feedback.

Why Does VoE Matter?

Employees are on the front lines daily, which means they can offer companies rich intell into customer opinions about the existing CX. Likewise, employees can connect those perceptions to what’s not working inside the businesses, or which elements generate strong loyalty and advocacy with customers.

Some companies solicit VoC feedback as part of employee engagement surveys, which normally happen about once a year. A small minority of brands have invested in both technology and practices that build a culture of continual employee participation in shaping and improving the customer experience. Armed with both insider company knowledge and a unique understanding of customers, most employees have useful ideas for how to create a differentiated CX. Often, these insights are otherwise unavailable to decision makers higher up within the company.

Inviting employees to become co-creators of the customer experience fosters a sense of shared responsibility for company success. Benefits of this approach include the ability to design and execute truly differentiated experiences for customers that return more value to companies, increased efficiencies and improved employee investment and retention.

For VoE to make a positive impact on company processes and decisions, businesses must purposefully connect employee engagement and Voice of Employee, employee feedback with customer experience efforts.

Here are a few tips on how to do this well:

1. Educate Employees on Key CX Areas

Customer feedback is too often used to focus employees solely on improving negative customer experiences. Companies must focus at least as much time to helping employees understand the ideal customer experience they want to create, their role in making that happen, and how customers feel when the have great experiences.

Organizational leaders must quickly and constantly communicate any changes to brand promises or customer experience goals so employees can offer feedback on key CX components and identify where there are disconnects and disasters, as well as successes. Every piece of customer feedback is valuable, and withholding information from employees creates gaps in understanding, and therefore problem-solving abilities.

Knowledge of future CX plans should also be readily shared to ensure employees are engaged and understand their role in improving CX long term. Employees who understand a company’s CX vision can better address customer concerns and prioritize customer feedback that aligns with pending CX blueprints. Likewise, employees in the loop with future CX plans can better monitor when plans do not adequately address common customer concerns, which helps companies avoid misguided investments.

2. Make Smart VoE Technology Investments

Never missing a moment of feedback demands the appropriate VoE technology. However, not just any technology can keep pace with the high volume of employee feedback needed to generate actionable CX improvements.

For example, the best VoE technologies allow employees to offer feedback in the manner and time that’s easiest for them. This may include open online forums, ad hoc email and video surveys or more in-depth annual explorations. Likewise, VoE platforms should be able to handle a variety of feedback types, including unstructured comments. While structured questions can point companies in the right direction, employee verbatims about the customer experience are by far the richest source of actionability.

Companies should look for technology vendors that can handle this type of data at scale with purpose-built text analytics. And accuracy rates matter. A company can’t act on information that isn’t analyzed. A high degree of variety also gives businesses the flexibility to institute VoE programs that best fit their specific needs. Companies should seek out technology vendors that offer mix-and-match capabilities to best fit and meet all employee feedback preferences.

3. Express Gratitude for Employee Feedback in Word and Deed

Employers should get in the habit of clearly communicating the critical nature of VoE feedback to overall company success. Reinforcing the value of employees’ voices encourages a steady stream of feedback and reinforces employees’ role as indispensable agents of change.

Employers must also find ways to clearly communicate they have heard and appreciate employee feedback, as well as the actions they intend to take. As with customers, when employees give feedback and then hear nothing but crickets, the effect on the relationship can be more negative than not asking for feedback at all.

Employees must express genuine appreciation. Gratitude comes in many shapes and sizes. For example, companies can reach out to individual employees and personally thank them for their feedback, or even reward them. Blanket company praise is good, but not sufficient. Top VoE technologies streamline feedback to help companies identify vocal employees and extend one-to-one thanks.

Companies should pursue operational decisions with employees in mind to support appreciate with investments. For instance, picking VoE technologies that are easy to use demonstrates respect for employees’ time and input.

Every organization has unique CX needs, and each should pursue the right technology investments to capitalize on its specific feedback sources. However, despite differences, all companies must make VoE technology purchasing decisions that focus on one goal—constantly collecting, analyzing and acting on feedback from customers and employees. 

In most organizations, customer experience initiatives are designed, executed, and owned by marketing or operations. We see more CX-specific leaders and departments coming online as well in an attempt to move more of the organization towards customer centricity.

Regardless of who “owns” customer experience, their view is inherently limited to the types and frequency of interactions they have with your customers. This produces blind spots in the holistic lens of customer experience. This limited view causes over-generalizations based on non-representative samples of Voice of Customer data (VoC), shared mythologies generated by compelling anecdotes, and often misses key attributes in the customer experience. Unless CX “owners” are keenly aware of these blind spots, the particular data they’re privy to can actually create a form of skewed groupthink, obscuring the broader truths that exist in customer-brand interactions.

Enter Voice of Employee.

What Exactly Is Voice of Employee?

We hear a lot about the impact Employee Engagement has on Customer Experience. Most times, Employee Engagement is viewed in a vacuum. Every year or year-and-a-half, the Human Resources department trots out a survey asking employees to rate their satisfaction with various aspects of their jobs: benefits, pay, management, work-life balance, and so on. Rarely, if ever are employees explicitly asked about their perspectives on the customer experience. What are their perceptions of what’s working, and what’s not—and more importantly—why? What would they recommend as solutions? What new ideas do they have to improve how your brand delivers on customer expectations? This is Voice of Employee.

Forrester Research defines Voice of Employee (VoE) as “Any feedback from employees or partners that pertains to their ability to deliver great customer experiences.” Without it, you have a huge blind spot in understanding your customer experience, and in achieving positive relationships and business outcomes. The importance of employee voice in the workplace has become more relevant today than ever in order to increase workplace satisfaction, performance, and overall retention. The key to ensuring that this essential feedback continues is to demonstrate that the organization values the voice of employee by not only collecting the feedback, but showing that it has an impact and influence in the workplace.

A Frontline View

Your employees are the face of your company. They are the primary representatives and executioners of the company’s customer experience. Not only do employees interact with customers, they often have a broader view of the operational performance of your organization. Think of it this way: While a single customer can share his/her perceptions of their experiences at specific touchpoints and throughout their journeys, they provide an important, but limited, sample size of one. A single employee, on the other hand, may interact with hundreds of customers each day and therefore the depth of their feedback around the customer experience is much greater. Also, the breadth of their perspective is greater as they can see all of the elements that contribute to a good or bad experience. The elements that may frustrate an employee, whether it be making a customer wait in line, poor service from customer care or billing, or any myriad of issues, are often the same things that frustrate customers.

And their perspectives contain unique and powerful insights. A recent survey by CustomerThink of CX leaders in business-to-business organizations reported that two-thirds of those leaders feel employees are the top source of actionable insights about the customer experience.

If employees can provide you with such a large percentage of actionable, success-driving insights, asking for their opinion cannot be relegated only to the normal 18-to-24-month Employee Engagement survey cycle. As gold mines of insight-laden information, smart brands should provide a variety of employee feedback forums, and establish voice of employee surveys and programs.

Owning the Experience

Soliciting employees for feedback about the customer experience comes with other benefits. Asking for their best ideas and opinions creates a sense of respect and value from the organization and its leaders. Unlike scheduled employee surveys, the process of gathering Voice of Employee feedback is, in and of itself, an engaging experience. Essentially, VoE tells employees that they matter and that they have ownership in customer experience, significantly increasing the likelihood your CX initiatives will achieve the desired results.

Broadening Your Perspective

The key to broadening your perspective of the customer experience is to listen through multiple channels to multiple stakeholders. After customers, employees are the next stakeholder group you must tap into in order to gain an increasingly broad and deep understanding of how all of the factors in your organization are coming together to deliver on what you’ve promised. Voice of Employee is key to listening and gathering other perspectives to help you make better workplace and business decisions. Just like your customers, your employees are able and willing to help you succeed. If you let them. Gather more VoE insights to improve your workplace with Pearl-Plaza.

A Rare Breed

A good leader can change an organization. A great leader can change history. Because leaders throughout history have had—and continue to have—such great influence over those around them, it’s not all that shocking that the qualities and traits of great leaders have been studied quite vigorously in the past few decades in an attempt to uncover the secrets behind history’s most influential leaders.

In one such study called “Follower-Focused Leadership: Effect of Follower Self-Concepts and Self-Determination on Organizational Citizenship Behavior,” Michelle Vondey investigates transformational leadership, which focuses on empowering individuals to work for the best interests of the organization. In her study, Vondey breaks down transformational leadership into these five characteristics.

The 5 Characteristics of Transformational Leadership

Communicate a Clear Vision

Effective leaders know what they want and understand the necessary steps to achieve their goals. By communicating these goals with every member of the organization, expectations are set and a game plan can be more clearly defined.

Explain How Vision Can Be Achieved

Once the vision for the business is defined, good leaders put together a detailed plan of action and share it with each member of the organization. A step-by-step plan helps everyone involved develop more effective processes and create clear expectations for each department of the organization.

Show Confidence in Both Vision and Followers

You’ve heard it time and time again: Confidence is contagious. And, you know what? It’s true. Good leaders show confidence in their vision and in the people executing it. That confidence leads to more confidence and ultimately results in achieving a collective goal.

Lead by Example

Every leader worth their weight in gold has followers. The thing about followers, though, is that they perform better with examples to follow. Good leaders don’t tell followers that they’re committed to the vision; they show it.

Here’s an example of Walt Disney showing off some of his magical leader abilities:

“Walt Disney used to walk through Disneyland [and] if he happened to see a piece of paper on the ground, he would stoop down to pick it up. He called this ‘Stooping to Excellence.’ He knew that as he walked through the park, all of the employees were watching him. He had to demonstrate excellence. He had to demonstrate that he wasn’t beyond picking up trash off of the ground.”

—Shep Hyken, The Customer Focus

Empower Followers to Work toward Vision Achievement

Achieving a common goal is a noble cause, but it presents challenges of all sorts. To address these challenges, followers must be empowered to do what they need to do to achieve the vision of their leader.

Follow the Leader… to Customer Centricity

The right tools and technology certainly help to improve an organization’s customer experience, but a great leader makes all the difference. According to our recent report, company leaders that set a positive example for their employees are the number one critical driver of customer experience (CX) success. (Read more about the 5 critical drivers of B2B CX success in our blog.)

By leading by example and empowering employees to do their best work—and rewarding them for it—good leaders create an effective, customer-centric business.