Better experiences – every customer and employee wants them, businesses want to provide them, and solutions providers promise them. But how does one actually track something as elusive as an “experience”? The following is an introduction to how we help companies measure their delivered experiences.

At PeopleMetrics, we focus on tracking both behavioral and emotional outcomes. And while this approach can be a bit more complicated to explain, the composite score is proven to be more reliable than a single item score. In fact, when we compared our 2008 Most Engaged Customers data to our 2010 data, we found that a five point increase in Engagement correlated with a 56% cumulative share price appreciation.

This composite Engagement score is made up of four outcome questions, and we call the score REAP (as in “REAP the benefits” of an engaged customer base).

(R): Retention

Why: Engaged customers will spend more with you over their lifetime than with your competitors, and engaged employees will continue working for you

 (E): Effort

Why: Engaged customers will actually go out of their way to do business with you and are often willing to spend more to benefit from your products and services. Engaged employees feel inspired by their work environment to go above and beyond for customers.

(A): Advocacy

Why: Engaged customers spread the good word, making it easier and cheaper for you to attract new customers. Engaged employees recommend you as an employer allowing you to better compete for talent.

(P): Passion

Why: Engaged customers are passionate about the brand – so passionate that they may even spend time actively promoting the brand to others or defending the brand if others speak negatively about it. Engaged employees love the experience of working for you.

The composite of these four questions is the “ultimate score” or the “people metric.” It provides a snapshot of your most valuable assets: the people who purchase from you and work for you.

Additional Resources:

Introduction to Voice of the Employee

Introduction to Voice of the Customer

Taking Action on Customer Feedback

Photo courtesy of: Paul

Last year we launched our first annual Brand Ambassador Awards. We have found over the past 10 plus years of working in customer and employee engagement that every company has individuals in it who continually go above and beyond for clients. Using customer feedback we uncover their stories.

These employees have an empathetic understanding of the customer experience. They find ways for clients to save money. They get to know their businesses. They make customers smile.  They deliver. They create the human connection that brings the brand to life. They are the people the Brand Ambassador Awards recognize.

Last year we had the opportunity to talk with each of our 2011 winners about their customer service philosophy – why they do what they do. In each of these conversations we heard three key themes:

The company has a customer service philosophy that aligns with their own

Our Brand Ambassadors didn’t hesitate to acknowledge the customer-centric cultures that they worked in, and they were proud to be a part of them.  Further support: we found in our 2011 Employee Engagement Trends study that employees who work for customer-centric companies show much higher levels of Engagement.

The Point: If you want to get more Brand Ambassadors, emphasize the customer experience and align your company’s culture around it.

The individual feels a sense of pride, engagement, and personal responsibility

Our winner’s spoke about connecting on a human level, treating customers as they would want to be treated; the meaning that great customer service gives to life; and the personal responsibility that goes along with being the face of a company.

The Point: Brand Ambassadors care deeply about how their work impacts people, and sharing customer feedback is a valuable way to encourage them and their co-workers to continue doing exceptional work.

They rely on their team to help them deliver exceptional experiences

Each of our winners spoke about how they could not deliver great experiences without their team. In fact, one of our winners seemed genuinely confused by the personal recognition, insisting there was no way he could have done it alone.

The Point: If someone is constantly highlighting their own contributions, assume that while they might still being doing good work for your customers and clients, they are probably not a Brand Ambassador.

As you work toward achieving your customer experience goals in 2012, make sure to identify and celebrate your Brand Ambassadors. These individuals know what makes your customers completely happy. Don’t miss the opportunity to learn from their wisdom.

And watch out for our soon to be announced winners of the 2012 awards.

Additional Resources:

Unleash the Power of Your Brand Ambassadors

Outsourcing Inspiration: How Customer Feedback Creates Meaning at Work

Voice of the Customer Fact Sheet

Photo courtesy of: Michal Marcol

Engaging employees can be a daunting task, and with all of the jargon out there, it’s easy to get lost and not know what next steps to take.  In this post, we examine the eight dimensions of our Employee Engagement model, illustrated with real-life examples of companies who embody what these drivers are all about.

First, Resources and Rewards are the functional aspects of Employee Engagement. They are fundamental to the contract between an employee and a business.  Resources and Rewards need to be competitive and fair – without these basics, you cannot hope to satisfy, let alone, engage your employees. Pretty simple.

The intrinsic aspects are where it starts to get a bit more complicated…

Recognition in Accounting

One of our clients in the Accounting industry has the goal to deliver unmatched client service by aligning all employees around the company’s five core values. Using a homegrown “Twitter-like” application, employees nominate colleagues for doing something exceptional relating to these values. Throughout the year rewards and recognition will be given based on these nominations, and at the end one lucky employee will win a Mazda Miata 5 for their contributions.

Customer Focus at BUPA

BUPA is a health insurance company in the UK that is absolutely committed to their customers. Last year they won the Plain English Campaign Award for their gobbledygook-free website. In providing easy to understand information, BUPA has also built a culture of empathy toward the customer experience.

And this culture extends beyond the website. At the CXPA event this past October, our EVP Kate Feather learned of an interesting approach taken by BUPA to bring the customer front and center in the business. Specifically, the story goes that every BUPA customer service agent is given a budget to do something nice for their customers. One employee spent her budget on clothes for a baby born prematurely. In the retelling of this story the employee had tears in her eyes as she described how it felt to have the opportunity to touch someone’s life so closely.

Fun at American Hotel Register

The Fun dimension has a tendency to confuse the more practical among us. But the fun dimension captures so much more than holiday parties and water cooler chit chat about weekend plans. It’s about a sense of belonging, shared vision, and creativity. Another one of our own clients, American Hotel Register, provides every conceivable product for hospitality and specialty industries – including funeral homes. They take pride in having an open, quirky culture. The founder regularly walks the halls, greets people by name, gives employees hugs; they have daily guess the answer to the Snapple cap questions; and in January American will be hosting its second annual American Idol Competition at their annual Hospitality Expo.

Recently they had the opportunity to provide the producers of Glee with funeral urns for an upcoming episode, one of the American Hotel employees commented that American Hotel “puts the ‘FUN’ in FUNeral.” The directors liked it so much the little play on words made it into the Glee script.  

Growth at Lovett

Unless you live in Portland, Oregon, you probably haven’t heard of Lovett. Lovett has built an impressive company by focusing on employee Growth. They have built a solid training curriculum involving mentor-style orientation, options to learn skills in other departments, and even life skills like financial planning and investing. Lovett understands how important it is to have a team of smart, customer-focused employees who understand the company’s big picture vision. Even more surprising is that Lovett isn’t a cutting-edge management consulting firm, or an HR group; they do plumbing. And their staff retention rate is 100%.

Trust at Wegmans

The Trust dimension is really about trust in senior leadership – that they have employees’ best interests in mind and respect and value their work. At Wegman’s, this means involving store-level employees in the kinds of decisions typically made at higher levels, and avoiding creating policies addressing every possible scenario. The company’s philosophy is, “Employees first, customers second,” and by putting their employees first, their employees put the customers first – and Wegman’s boasts one of the best retention rates in the country and some of the highest customer ratings among grocery stores.

Purpose in Healthcare

Purpose is linked to a sense of accomplishment in work, the knowledge that a person’s work is having a positive impact on internal and external customers. Medtronic is a medical device manufacturer. They provide the opportunity for their engineers, technicians, and salespeople to attend surgical procedures so they can see the results of their work.

One of our Healthcare clients also has a great tactic for embedding a sense of purpose in their work. The patients they serve have central nervous system disorders; our client displays patient artwork throughout their hallways as well as printing mini reprints on the back of their business cards as a daily reminder of their commitment to improving the lives of the patients they serve.

What Drives Engagement at Your Company?

It’s overwhelming for any leader to think about tackling all of these dimensions at once. So we recommend starting small. Focus on one dimension that you can do (or perhaps are already doing) and build it out – whether it is getting your employees closer to your customer, building internal growth plans, or recognizing employees who do great work.

And, of course, if you are ready for some professional help, contact us. Our expertise lies in helping clients identify what their employees care about the most so they can focus action on the items that will have the greatest impact on their employees’ experiences.

Additional Resources:

Why Do Employees Deliver Great Customer Experiences? It’s Not ALL About the Money!

Using the Voice of Your Employee (VoE) to Improve the Employee Experience

Case for a Voice of the Employee (VoE) Solution

Shopping for insurance tends to be one of life’s less enjoyable moments – it’s difficult, time-consuming, and simply stressful. Data from our Most Engaged Customer study shows that the average Insurance engagement (ignoring the outlier that is USAA) is 42%, 9 points below the Engagement average across industries, as seen in the chart below.

Changing the Insurance Experience
According to a recent Accenture survey, 91% of insurers “believe that future growth depends on providing a special customer experience.” So it would appear that the industry has realized the current system is flawed and is actively interested in bridging the gap between average and exceptional. But what does an “exceptional customer experience” look like in the insurance industry? This the question we ask in the Most Engaged Customers study and we found that, regardless of industry, Customer Engagement is built from the following dimensions:

1. The Offer: Products, services, and/or experiences that customers really want

2. Care: A company culture that cares for and values customers

3. Consistency: Excellent service at every touch point

4. Trust: If something goes wrong, the customer has faith the company will put it right

5. Effort: Employees who exert extra effort and go above and beyond

6. Genuine: Authentic service from real people

The “hot button” issue for insurance customers is Effort – employees going above and beyond for the customer. This is especially true during Moments of Truth such as policy purchase, renewals and claims. Quotes we collected from our study illustrate the impact of Extra Effort perfectly:

“They went out of their way to find us discounts, cut back on what we really didn’t need in insurance.” (Progressive)

“They have always guided me to the best products for my point in life.” (USAA)

“My reps take their time going over questions. They also helped me to tow my vehicle. They went out of their way to offer to Google a tow company, provided me the number & called to confirm the company would be able to tow my vehicle in 30 minutes. THEY ARE AWESOME!” (Allstate)

Aligning the Company
68% of the insurers in Accenture’s study say they plan to increase spending on analytics, including data that will help them improve the customer experience. This is the first step in building a better offer and demonstrating care for customers. But it can’t stop there.

The next step will be aligning managers around this new mission to ensure consistency and nurture trust. And finally, based on our research, we predict that the true differentiator will be building a company culture that inspires front-line employees to give extra effort and allows them the freedom to be genuine in their interactions with policyholders.

To truly implement lasting change, every level of the company will need to be on board and playing their part in building better, more engaging, more memorable customer experiences.

Additional Resources:
Request a copy of the complete Most Engaged Customers Study with the Insurance Industry Focus
An Effective Treatment Plan for the Average Customer Experience
PeopleMetrics Voice of the Customer Solution

Employee engagement surveys have become an HR staple. In spite of their prevalence, a recent survey by TLNT and HRmarketer revealed that many of these surveys are a wasted effort:

45% of respondents feel that the survey being used by their organization had little or no value for managers or employees

48% of senior managers feel these surveys are highly valuable, only 19% of other respondents felt the same

48% of respondents believe that the surveys are not providing an honest or accurate employee assessment

Our own research has shown that when employee engagement surveys are conducted, and no follow up action is taken, employee engagement actually drops. And it looks like this may be happening quite often. 58% of respondents state that data gathered from these surveys does not or only slightly helps managers know what behaviors or practices to change in order to positively influence the employee experience. It’s obvious the current system is broken.

For leaders interested in not being a part of the 58% collecting useless or nearly useless data, the following are a few things to consider:

Make the Employee Experience part of your business strategy vs. an annual event

At the recent Customer Experience Professionals Association Event, it became apparent that an increasing number of companies are beginning to look at how the Customer Experience (Cx) and Employee Experience (Ex) are related. This means that having a workforce that actually finds meaning and purpose in their work is no longer just an HR problem; it’s a strategic problem.

Ask questions like “Why?” and “Where should I focus?” vs. “How many?” and “How do we compare?”

Understanding why and where to focus will help leaders take real, meaningful actions to change Ex. Driver analysis paired with open-ended comments from employees can arm your managers with a simple, clear understanding of what needs to improve and what they can do to boost engagement.

Focus on internal improvements vs. external benchmarks

Benchmarks are concerned with averages, aggregates, and incremental scores. But a survey that is used as part of an overall Ex plan will focus on action – looking at work group priorities and helping managers develop targeted, realistic plans.  Over time your best benchmarks are historical – an assessment of how successful your actions have been to move the needle – more than an external comparison that has little or no meaning to the actual experience your own employees are having. 

In “Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd,” Harvard Marketing Professor, Youngme Moon writes, “A funny thing happens the minute you begin to capture comparative differences on paper: There is a natural inclination for folks in the comparative set to focus on eliminating those differences, rather than accentuating them.” And while she is writing to Marketing, the same rules apply to HR – focusing on where you compare to others in your industry will, at best, help you create employee experiences that are essentially exactly like that of your closest competition.

Don’t assume your employees only care about how they personally experience your business

Your average employee engagement survey focuses on work experience issues and topics of satisfaction and engagement. But the average employee is hugely motivated by how their work impacts the customer experience. With that in mind, for an employee engagement survey to be truly impactful it also needs to gather information on how well the company enables employees to solve the customer’s problems or support others who are doing so and identify areas where barriers could be removed to improve both the external and  internal customer experiences.

If your goal is to measure employee engagement, then the traditional employee engagement survey should continue working for you. If your goal, however, is to provide your managers with a clear action plan on how to improve employee engagement then it may be time to consider a more holistic approach to the employee experience.

Download The Business Case for a Voice of the Employee Solution or email me at Janessa.lantz@peoplemetrics.com to receive a copy

Additional Resources:

Voice of the Employee Fact Sheet

Calculating the Cost of Employee Disengagement

Employee Engagement: Helping Employees Find Meaning on the Job

Photo courtesy of: Idea Go

For decades, it was assumed that employees were motivated only by extrinsic factors such as pay, resources, and health plans. While those traditional benefits are certainly still a motivating factor for most workers, more and more research is showing that employee engagement also has a lot to do with how people feel at work.

The PeopleMetrics’ 2011 Employee Engagement Trends Report found that since 2007 pay raises have been minimal, but the emotional factors such as trust, opportunities for growth, recognition, and a strong customer focus have improved. Today’s employees are reporting more satisfaction with these emotional aspects of their work than they did a few years ago.

One of the most often cited emotional drivers of employee engagement is a sense of purpose. To encourage a sense of meaning among your employees (and thereby increase employee engagement), consider the tips listed below.

Look Beyond Mere Survival; Highlight the Big Picture. If your focus as a leader is on simply making it until next week or next quarter, your employees will have a difficult time seeing the bigger purpose behind their roles. One way to improve this situation is to discuss each employee’s impact during performance reviews. For instance, the person who manages accounts payable at a dentist’s office may see himself as little more than a fancy bill-paying system, until his or her manager points out that his important accounting work keeps everyone organized enough to create a good setting for healing.

Share Positive Customer Feedback with Employees. The 2011 PeopleMetrics Employee Engagement Trends Report found that employees want to be part of the customer experience solution. Just sharing customer feedback with employees can make them more engaged, especially when the feedback is positive. We found that 55% of employees who receive customer recognition are engaged, as compared with just 12% of employees who do not receive customer recognition. Similarly, employees whose managers tell them they have done a good job serving customers are 1.5 times more likely to agree with the statement, “I get a sense of purpose from my work.” Sharing customer feedback can be a powerful addition to any Voice of the Employee program.

Study Your Most Engaged Employees.
High employee engagement is contagious for both customers (who tend to be more engaged when they interact with enthusiastic employees) and for other employees. In this sense, an investment in a Voice of the Employee program is an investment in customer engagement.  We suggest choosing a Voice of the Customer solution that can help you identify which employees are consistently earning praise from customers. Next, you can study how those employees find meaning in their work, and train the rest of your workers to follow suit.

PeopleMetrics is not the only research group that has found a link between employee engagement and a sense of meaning. For instance, the Director of Research at Harvard Business School, Teresa Amabile, recently reported on her studies of employee engagement, saying that the most influential factor was, “making progress in meaningful work.” Amabile and her partners defined meaningful work as “work where the person is contributing something of real value, something they care about.” By implementing the actions described above, you can embed purpose and meaning into the employee experience.

Additional Resources:
Integrating Employee Engagement into the Performance Management Process
Calculating the Cost of Employee Disengagement
Average vs. Great: Why the Quality of Service Matters

A shift is underway in the performance management world. Some HR directors, c-suite leaders, and organizational researchers espouse the idea that employee engagement should be an integral part of the performance review process. This approach would augment the traditional performance review, in which an employer delivers a critique of an employee’s performance. A paper recently published in the Human Resources Management Review argued that employers should manage and attempt to improve employee engagement as a part of the review process. The paper’s writers imply that a Voice of the Employee program that boosts employee engagement will generally boost overall staff performance as well.

In their paper, Professor Alan Saks from the University of Toronto and Professor Jamie Gruman of the University of Guelph contend that many organizations can see improved employee performance by managing employee engagement. Gruman and Saks found that “engagement helps predict job performance,” which in turn impacts the bottom line. As professor Jamie Gruman of the University of Guelph explains, “Employees who feel engaged in their tasks do a better job, are less likely to make mistakes, and bring more energy, dedication and vigor into their performance.” Characteristics of employee engagement include excellent focus, absorption in one’s work, and a feeling of overall integration at work, according to Saks and Gruman.

Based both on the research conducted by Saks and Gruman and our own findings, here are a few things management can do to integrate employee engagement into the review process:

Conduct regular Voice of the Employee reviews.
Too many employee engagement programs fizzle after an initial exploratory, baseline study. To build employee engagement over time, you must conduct regular employee surveys. Otherwise, there is no way to track your progress. Moreover, management will find it’s much easier to enact company changes with reliable, continuous employee feedback data.

Research and Improve Work Setting.

In their research, Saks and Gruman found that the following psychological conditions foster employee engagement:

Meaningfulness. Engagement is more likely when employees feel that their work is important, valuable, and meaningful.

Safety. An engaged employee feels that it is safe to do his/her job without fear of damaging his/her career, self-image, or status.

Availability. Engaged employees are not only responding to external stimuli at work; they are also employing a range of their own internal physical, emotional, and psychological resources.

Your performance review for each employee can also include a measurement of these psychological conditions. Do your employees feel safe and valued at work, so that they can maximize their own skills?

Personalize your Employee Engagement Efforts.
A cookie-cutter Voice of the Employee program will be less effective than one tailored for specific organizations and individuals. Remember that every employee needs something slightly different to feel engaged. As Saks explains, “Some employees might need more autonomy in their work, more challenge, more input, or perhaps more support or training.” Folding your employee engagement efforts into the review process makes it more likely that you’ll have the chance to sit down with each employee and figure out what he or she needs to do his or her best work.

Gruman and Saks point out one final benefit of conducting employee engagement research while conducting performance reviews: Doing so sends the message that the firm truly values employee engagement.

Additional Resources:
3 Common Causes of Employee Disengagement
Calculating the Cost of Employee Disengagement
How Disengaged Employees Create Disengaged Customers

Employee Engagement and Customer Engagement Connection (Fig. 1)

A wealth of data has been published since the early 1990s by PeopleMetrics and others that lend support to this formula. The terminology may be different but essentially the prevailing view is that employees who are engaged – emotionally connected to the work they do – are more likely to exert extra effort on behalf of customers which in turn creates an emotional connection between customers and the brand.  And emotions drive profits.  Customers who ‘love’ a brand are more likely to return, tell others about it and even go out of their way to do business with that organization.

Customer-Centricity –> Engaged Employees

The soon to be released PeopleMetrics 2011 Employee Engagement Trends Report uncovers compelling evidence to suggest that organizations that adopt best practices in customer-centricity have more engaged employees.

The study gathered feedback from more than 2,500 employees across a range of industries including: professional services, financial services, telecommunications, media and entertainment, retail , hospitality and healthcare to tell us about the customer-focus practices adopted by their companies.  Customer-centric organizations were defined as those where employees said:

Employee Engagement in Company-Centric vs. Customer-Centric Organizations (Fig. 2)

a)     Customers are:

• Part of the Mission
• Highly loyal
• Invited to give feedback

b)     And employees are:

• Empowered to handle customer issues
• Invited to give ideas on the customer experience
• Provided customer feedback
• Told when they have done a good job serving customers

Company-centric companies were defined as those where employees said that their companies did not apply these practices with the same degree of consistency.

The analysis then examined how employees in these two groups (those working for Company-centric versus Customer-centric companies) rated their work experience and, in particular, how engaged they were with their employers.  The differences between the two groups are dramatic.

• Two-thirds of employees working Customer-centric companies are Engaged; and one in four are Fully Engaged (see Figure 2)
• Contrast this with just 22% of employees in Company-centric companies who are
  

  The Impact of Customer Strategy on Employee Behaviors (Fig. 3)

  considered engaged; and just 4% who are Fully Engaged

Furthermore, two to two and a half times as many employees in company-centric organizations compared to customer-centric companies say that (see Figure 3):

a)     It would take a lot to get them to leave their current employer

b)     They are motivated by the work environment to give extra effort and

c)     They recommend their company as a great place to work

d)     They love their company or organization

Sharing the Customer Experience Creates Purpose and Meaning

One of the above practices is particularly impactful when it comes to the employee experience.  Specifically, sharing customer feedback with employees cultivates a sense of purpose at work that is not there for those who do not receive that feedback.

• Across industries, employees who are told when they have done a good job serving customers are 1.5 times as likely to agree “I get a sense of purpose from my work” (80% vs. 54% agree to feeling purpose, respectively)

• Accordingly, the boost to a sense of purpose at work drives overall Employee Engagement upwards. Employees who receive customer Recognition are 4.5 times as likely to be Engaged compared to those who do not receive this feedback (55% Engaged vs. just 12%, respectively)

Bringing the Customer inside the Company

In a recent HBR article “How Customers Can Rally Your Troops,” Adam M. Grant, management professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, provides in depth insight into this idea. He references companies who “outsource inspiration” by bringing in customers and end users to tell their stories to front line employees. The results of these endeavors provide evidence that while traditionally leaders and managers have felt the responsibility to “rally the troops” toward better performance it is actually meaningful customer feedback that holds the greatest influence on employee motivation.

The New Service Profit Loop (Fig. 4)

So perhaps we need to reconsider the service profit chain, perhaps it looks something more like the image in Figure 4 – a service profit loop.

Companies need to start by admitting that employees need to find meaning and purpose in their work beyond a paycheck.

And those companies that start to actively look for ways to outsource inspiration will be rewarded by higher levels of Employee Engagement and better business results.

This article was originally posted on CustomerThink.com.

Our 2011 Employee Engagement study is currently in the works and we are so excited to share the results. We’re uncovering some unexpected trends, surprising findings and best practices we might not have predicted.

In preparation for the release of the study here is a review of three things that always impact Employee Engagement:

1. Trust in Management.

Research has found that lack of trust in company leaders is a major factor in employee disengagement. Under this heading we can place a couple of specific reasons why employees lack trust in their leaders.

a) Management handles change poorly.
A Right Management/Manpower study found that 94% of employees who report that organizational change was not handled well are disengaged. In comparison, Right Management found a 40% disengagement rate among employees who reported that change was handled well. Good communication was found to be a major component in whether employees felt that change was handled well.

b) No personal/emotional connection to management.
Blessing White’s 2011 Employee Engagement report found that knowing one’s manager personally tends to increase an employee’s engagement levels by 11 points, on average. Moreover, “a better relationship with my manager” was one of the top three things employees said would improve their job satisfaction.

2. Purpose, Meaning, or Connection to Organizational Vision.

Karl Marx anticipated this cause of employee disengagement when he wrote about the worker’s sense of alienation. When your employees are alienated from the final impact their work has on the world, there is little motivation for them to expend any discretionary effort. Marx saw alienation as an unsolvable flaw of the capitalist system; however, many businesses are successfully communicating the deeper meaning of the work they do. When employees can see how their hours at the office are changing the world, improving customers’ lives, or otherwise making a difference, they are more likely to get fired up about their work. On a company-wide level, Employee Engagement is nearly impossible to foster without leadership first recognizing the underlying mission of the organization.

3. Opportunities to Grow or Advance.

In the Blessing White report mentioned above, the number one reason employees stated for leaving their company was “I don’t have opportunities to grow or advance.” Your employees don’t want to be robots. They are looking for jobs that will allow them to continue to grow as individuals. The other two things that respondents said would increase their employee satisfaction were 1) career development and training, and 2) “more opportunities to do what I do best.” Encourage and empower your employees to continue learning and growing, and they’ll reward you with higher productivity levels.

Remember that people are complicated beings and work around Employee Engagement can be as difficult and messy as it is fascinating and rewarding. Companies that commit to creating a workplace that fosters engagement have and will continue to be rewarded with growth.

Want to be the first to receive a copy of this report? Sign up here and we will send it to you off the presses.

Additional Resources:
Calculating the Cost of Employee Disengagement
How Disengaged Employees Create Disengaged Customers
HR Practices to Boost Employee and Customer Engagement

Too often, employee engagement is seen as little more than an added expense—many equate employee engagement with higher spending on benefits. This doesn’t have to be the case. Our research has shown that many employees simply want to feel that their work matters—that what they do makes a difference. This feeling can be achieved on both an individual level, by thanking each employee for their hard work, and on a company-wide level, by rallying the troops for a cause.

While “going green” isn’t quite the hot trend it was a few years ago, it has proven its staying power and is increasingly showing up in corporate strategy. We suggest developing some integration between your employee engagement and earth-friendly initiatives to maximize both investments.  Employee engagement surveys are a wonderful place to start. They can help you understand what environmental issues are most important to them,  allowing companies to invest in initiatives that matter to their people and will incite their support.

Earth-friendly initiatives can boost employee engagement by sending the message that the company is making a difference for the environment. Employees feel more connected to their employers when they know the entire company is united in an effort to be green and in a way that matters to them. Here are three ways you can energize and unify your staff while saving the planet.

Get a Conversation Going About Saving the Earth. Around Earth Day this year, commercial real estate company Jones Lang LaSalle invited employees to post short blogs on green topics at the company’s Green Blog. Employees who posted were rewarded with a gift card for a music download. (Even the gift card was green—it could be planted after use to grow into a tree!)

Other companies, such as McGraw-Hill and Portland’s Ruby Receptionists, empower employees to save the planet by forming green committees, groups of employees who meet to discuss how the company can operate in more environmentally friendly ways.  These committees often find solutions that executives have overlooked. For instance, your “Green Team” might suggest buying a company bike for employees to use during work hours, thereby eliminating many short car trips around town.

Encourage Green Commutes. Employees can feel energized and proud of the Co2 reduction their company contributes. We know from experience. Every PeopleMetrics employee commutes in a green way, whether they take public transportation, walk, or ride their bikes. Recognizing and rewarding employees for taking a green path to work can come in the form of public transit credits, or holding monthly drawings for green commuters.

Beyond building a sense of workplace community around saving the earth, green commutes benefit the company by encouraging employee wellness. Those who bike commute, for instance, see far less hospital visits and illnesses.  Furthermore, the natural release of adrenaline that comes with exercise puts bike commuters and walkers in a better state of mind when they reach the office. Even encouraging employee carpools can result in higher employee engagement, as it gives employees a chance to connect on the way to the office.

Participate in Green Events. Whether you celebrate Earth Day by joining in a charity walkathon or share how employees spent Earth Hour with their lights off, participating in green events gets employees jazzed about their contribution. Look for opportunities to invite employees to engage in events off site. Bring along a camera and post pictures to the company blog. Employees will feel proud of themselves and their employer following such an event.

Employee engagement research shows that workers want to have a good relationship with their managers and their coworkers, and that they want to feel that their work is helping improve the world. Ask your employee engagement people to talk to your Corporate Social Responsibility people and see how their efforts can be integrated to build a stronger workplace culture and a stronger earth.

Additional Resources:
Calculating the Cost of Employee Disengagement
How Disengaged Employees Create Disengaged Customers
HR Practices to Boost Employee Engagement and Customer Engagement

[photo: DonkeyHotey]

Customers do not build a passionate connection to a company through company policies, customer service procedures, or name badges. Because customers are people and people do not connect to buildings, signage or inanimate objects, they connect to other people. And when they feel a positive connection to a person they begin to feel warmly toward the company they are doing business with.

Brand Ambassadors are the people inside your organization who, through their great work and commitment to service, create Passionate Promoters of your brand. In turn, these Passionate Promoter customers are living, breathing advertisements for your organization, bringing in new customers who are more engaged and more forgiving of service errors. Brand Ambassadors are crucial catalysts that set off a whole series of positive outcomes for your business. That’s why we believe it’s important to seek out Brand Ambassadors as part of any successful Voice of Customer (VoC) campaign. Every company has Brand Ambassadors within its ranks—the challenge lies in finding them.

PeopleMetrics’ research for the 2011 Brand Ambassador Award winners uncovered certain characteristics that all Brand Ambassadors share:

1) The company’s customer service philosophy resonates with Brand Ambassadors.

Employee Engagement is high among Brand Ambassadors. Our research shows that part of this stems from the fact that Brand Ambassadors agree with their organization’s ideas about how customers should be treated.

Susannah Heitger, a Brand Ambassador at Crowe Horwath LLC, explains, “Crowe always seeks to do what is best for the client. It’s easy to push for a bigger system, bigger project, but if they don’t need it, the client’s trust is eroded. We strive to be a trusted advisor.”

2) Brand Ambassadors see important meaning in their work, and this makes them proud, engaged, and conscientious.

You’ve probably heard about the brick layer who, when asked what he was doing, reported that he was building a cathedral that would stand for centuries. And we’ve written about hospital janitors who say they’re saving lives by providing a clean, safe hospital environment. These employees are engaged because they are able to see the significance in their work. Likewise, Brand Ambassadors see their work with customers as meaningful and important, as the following quotes from Brand Ambassador Award winners epitomize:

“I truly believe that this is important stuff. Customer Service is important. It gives life meaning.” (Peter Landis, Signature Flight Support)

“I just think about how I would like to be treated as a customer….it’s about treating others as you would like to be treated.” (Barbara Zonin, The Addis Group)

3) Brand Ambassadors appreciate their co-workers.

All of the 2011 Brand Ambassador Award winners talked about being a part of a larger team of talented co-workers. For instance, Peter Landis at Signature Flight Support told us, “It’s the whole base, the whole team, not me that makes this award possible.” Strong teams are a rich environment for the creation of Brand Ambassadors.

Although we have found that Brand Ambassadors share the above characteristics, it’s important to remember that because every business is unique, every organization’s Brand Ambassadors will be unique as well. You may not know which of your employees consistently provide “wow!” experiences, but your customers do. Therefore, the best way to find the Brand Ambassadors within your ranks is to set up a Voice of Customer (VoC) program that can systematically gather feedback from customers on which employees provide stellar service. PeopleMetrics’ Voice of Customer solution, for instance, sends a special Recognition Alert to managers and leadership when a customer praises an employee by name. Once you know who the Brand Ambassadors are in your organization, you can study what they do right, so you can teach other employees how to create the connections and experiences that turn your customers into Passionate Promoters.

Additional Resources:
How Disengaged Employees Create Disengaged Customers
How Brand Ambassadors Impact Customer Engagement
The Role of Emotional Intelligence in Delivering Authentic Customer Service

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This post was provided by PeopleMetrics, a Philadelphia-based firm that provides a Voice of the Customer program to help companies engage customers. PeopleMetrics also offers Voice of the Employee programs to engage and energize employees.

Best Practices to Boost Employee Engagement and Customer Engagement ~ Employee Engagement is central to long-term business success. Excellence in organizational and Human Resource practices results in higher levels of retention, productivity, and better service quality. Unfortunately, few companies are successfully engaging their employees. Research shows that 84% of employees plan to look for a new job in 2011; that’s no surprise, when only 27% of employees are actively engaged on the job. An unsteady job market may have been sufficient in retaining employees over the past two years, but this is no longer true. It is imperative to take targeted actions to ensure you hold onto your best talent.

Among other research, our annual Most Engaged Customers report has shown that the easiest way to get a customer to fall in love with a company is for them to experience exceptional service delivered by Engaged Employees. In other words, Engaged Employees who are passionate about their work inspire the customers they touch to be highly engaged as well. High Employee Engagement fosters high Customer Engagement. In turn, Customer Engagement impacts bottom-line metrics including stock price, profit rates, and ROI.

This makes sense in today’s challenging economic climate, where the customer experience is a company’s competitive advantage.  Behavioral economists tell us that just 30% of the average purchasing decision is rational—the other 70% is emotional. Most of us decide where to spend our money by how we feel in the store—how we feel while talking to that front-line employee. Nonchalant, apathetic employees create a less-than-stellar customer experience. Actively disengaged employees create actively disengaged customers.

At the same time, every company has Brand Ambassadors—people who provide such amazing customer service that they act as living advertisements for the brand. One experience with an exceptional employee is often enough to create a Passionate Promoter—a customer who will bring in new business through enthusiastic recommendations to family and friends.

How can you foster Employee Engagement and create more Brand Ambassadors? Well, here are a few tips we’ve culled during our ten years working with companies:

Start a conversation with employees. One of the most effective ways to pre-empt the dreaded mass exodus of top talent is to start listening to them. Before launching into an in-depth employee survey initiative that can take many months of leadership approvals, buy-in and planning, online or electronic focus groups can be a quick, cost-effective and valuable way to learn what is on employees’ minds and what they think you can do to fix some of the issues negatively impacting Engagement and future retention of staff.

Measure and Identify Priorities. Of course, there are tremendous benefits to employee surveys as well. They give leadership an understanding of the extent of the issues and how many employees perceive opportunities for improvement in company procedures, culture, and work practices.  Later, ongoing “check in” surveys can help employers understand shifts in employee priorities and opinions.

Listen to Customers to find Brand Ambassadors. A strong Voice of the Customer (VoC) program  goes hand-in-hand with a strong Voice of the Employee (VoE) program. Our online dashboard automatically sends a targeted “Brand Ambassador” alert when a customer praises an individual employee by name. This allows you to study what these employees do differently that so engages your customers.

Take action on your unique Employee Engagement drivers. The building blocks of Employee Engagement tend to be consistent across sectors, companies and job roles; however, the importance of those building blocks will vary across and within companies. Compensation and benefits are clearly important drivers of engagement across all companies, but they may not actually be the most influential variables in your company. Are your employees looking for more fun on the job? Or are they yearning for more meaning in their work? Fun in the form of on-the-job line dances works at Texas Roadhouse, but it probably wouldn’t work in an accounting firm. Avoid cookie-cutter solutions; instead, use ongoing Employee Engagement Management questionnaires to stay plugged in to your employees’ needs and dreams.

Starbucks founder Howard Schultz has said, “The relationship we have with our people and the culture of our company is our most sustainable competitive advantage.”  Through Voice of the Employee and Voice of the Customer, you can discover organizational practices to create Passionate Promoters and Raving Fans among both your employees and your customers. And in doing so ensure that in the coming months your best employees will choose to continue to work for you and not your competition.

Additional Resources
Creating Brand Ambassadors Through Recognize Alerts
The Role of Emotional Intelligence in Delivering Authentic Customer Service
The Link Between Employee Engagement and Customer Engagement

Being “customer-centric” is a buzz concept in business today, but it is still little more than a theory in most companies. Customer-centric businesses operate according to what their customers want. That seems obvious, but the truth is that most companies have an “inside-out” focus, as Steve Denning writes at Forbes.com. We might call such organizations “company-centric.” At company-centric firms, protocols, product development, and management approaches all originate from within the company, rather than from customers.

In contrast, customer-centric or “outside-in” companies take their cues from their customers. Company culture has a lot to do with the shift toward customer-centric operations, but today’s Enterprise Feedback Management technology can also help. By continuously gathering customer feedback, responding to that feedback in real-time, and sharing customer requests, gripes, and raves, companies can put the customer in the driver’s seat and thereby maximize profits.

Roger Martin explains why companies must become more customer-centric in his Harvard Business Review article, “The Age of Customer Capitalism.” Reviewing the performance of S&P shareholder returns since 1932, he concludes that, because they are based on market expectations, share prices do not reliably rise when executives aim to maximize shareholder returns. Martin writes, “to create shareholder value, you should instead aim to maximize customer satisfaction.” PeopleMetrics’ research extends and supports this idea; we have found that companies with the highest Customer Engagement levels also see the highest improvements in share value, among other business indicators.

Voice of the Customer (VoC) software can help foster a customer-centric approach by continuously gathering customer feedback, and passing on that feedback to managers, executives, and front-line employees. For instance, results from PeopleMetrics 5-minute “check-in” customer surveys are immediately available on our special online dashboard. Company leadership decides which employees should have access to which survey results. The online Voice of the Customer portal allows managers and front-line employees to can immediately understand what’s delighting customers, and what’s not. Customer feedback can be at the heart of operations with modern EFM technology.

Furthermore, PeopleMetrics has developed tools to highlight and manage crucial customer feedback. For instance, our Voice of the Customer solution sends a Recover Alert if a customer indicates a problem with the company. Managers can then reply in a timely manner—often within 24 hours, since feedback is available in real-time.

A customer-centric approach is only possible when organizations maintain an ongoing conversation with customers. With powerful Customer Engagement software tools at employees’ fingertips, companies can sustain a conversation with customers about what products, features, and experiences they prefer. Real-time customer feedback alerts can help companies maximize Customer Engagement and boost bottom-line business metrics.

Additional Resources
How to Measure Customer Satisfaction: Our Best Practices for Determining Customer Love
Enterprise Feedback Management Dashboard Tools to Improve Efficiency
Benefits of Assigning Customer Engagement Research Access Levels

A Chinese proverb advises, “Don’t open a shop unless you like to smile.” For millennia, business owners have appreciated the power of a smile to improve sales. Allow me to take some liberty with ancient wisdom and add to that, “Don’t work in customer service if you don’t enjoy making other people smile.” Employees that truly care about delivering smile-worthy experiences radiate genuine happiness at work; their natural enthusiasm attracts new customers and engages long-term customers. Here at PeopleMetrics, we call these employees Brand Ambassadors. In addition to flashing authentic smiles at every customer they meet, Brand Ambassadors provide unparalleled service— the kind that can only be delivered by someone who truly cares about a customer’s happiness, the kind that leaves customers raving and sales figures booming.

In this era of scripted customer service, it’s natural to be cynical. Aren’t today’s customers too savvy to fall for that old “service with a smile” schtick? As it turns out, no. Our research shows that, through stand-out service, Brand Ambassadors endear customers, thereby growing customer engagement, which, in turn, is connected to a slew of bottom-line indicators including share-of-wallet and ROI.

What distinguishes the kind of service that Brand Ambassadors provide? Our research into the brands with the highest Customer Engagement levels reveals that Brand Ambassadors:

• Demonstrate high Emotional IQ. They tune into the customer’s emotional state, respond appropriately, and discover solutions that benefit both the customer and the company.
• Treat customers like friends or even family. A Brand Ambassador greets customers by name and remembers details that may have come up in previous interactions.
• Provide Authentic Service. Customers can spot a fake smile a mile away. A genuine smile is a rare thing these days—it’s something that customers will remember and return for.

As an example, consider Steve Wynn’s story about an amazing bellman at one of Wynn’s Vegas resort casinos. As an older couple was checking in, they realized they’d forgotten their medication at home. Because the husband was diabetic, missing their medication would mean ending their vacation. After making arrangements with and reassuring the couple, the bellman actually drove back to their house (a four-hour drive!), picked up the medication, and had it back at the casino in time for their 7am required doses. You can bet that couple will be extremely loyal customers going forward. And they probably shared their story with plenty of friends, attracting new business. But the Brand Amabassador bellman’s influence didn’t stop there. His dilligence spread through the rest of the organization, inspiring his fellow employees to seek out their own opportunities to help casino guests.

In the end, today’s customers are looking for more than the best product at the lowest price. They have plenty of choices when it comes to finding inexpensive, functional products and services. That’s why the modern key differentiator is the customer experience. Brand Ambassadors create an exceptional experience that exceeds customers’ emotional and functional needs.

Every company has Brand Ambassadors. The problem is that so many fail to find them and unleash their potential.  Recognizing and learning from these individuals can set the standard for customer experiences. When employees are encouraged to imitate the best, excellence becomes contagious in the organization – an imperative for anyone concerned with building a truly customer-centric culture.  As more and more employees become full-fledged Brand Ambassadors, Customer Engagement rises, and business outcomes improve.

The challenge is that no two company’s Brand Ambassadors look alike. Every company is unique; there is no “one size fits all” solution as far as the customer experience is concerned, but your Brand Ambassadors know how to deliver the perfect experience for your customers. A Voice of the Customer solution is the best way to spot the people in your company building valuable customer relationships.  Imitating the employees that customers love  guarantees that your steps toward customer-centricity will align perfectly with what your customer wants.

PeopleMetrics’ Voice of the Customer solution sends a special Recognition Alert when a customer praises an employee by name. Too often, companies only notice what employees are doing wrong, and fail to capitalize on the excellent work of Brand Ambassadors. PeopleMetrics’ Recognition Alert is a good indicator that you may have a Brand Ambassador on your hands—and once you’ve identified Brand Ambassadors, you can study their performance , train other employees accordingly and make excellent customer service contagious in your organization

Additional Resources:
Creating Brand Ambassadors Through Recognize Alerts
PeopleMetrics 2011 Brand Ambassador Award Winners Announced
How Customer Engagement Translates into Customer Behavior

[photo: clix]

[Steve Wynn video: via Tony Robbins]

Restaurants have a few advantages when it comes to customer service. Unlike in many industries, restaurant employees have the chance to interact personally with customers. This means restaurants have more opportunities to deliver a positive emotional experience to each guest. On the other hand, because it’s such a guest-focused industry, the bar for outstanding customer service is set a little higher in the restaurant arena. Therefore, restaurant managers and owners have more motivation to identify and replicate employee effort that engages and delights customers. In this article, we’ll examine the general customer service landscape in the restaurant sector. Next, we’ll take a look at the characteristics all businesses must exhibit in order to win high Customer Engagement, as our 2010 Most Engaged Customers (MEC) report revealed. Finally, we’ll zoom in on the “hot button” issues for customer engagement in the restaurant space.

PeopleMetrics found a 51% engagement rate among customers in all industries. However, if we limit the focus to only the restaurant sector, we find that 61% of customers are engaged. This implies that restaurant customers generally receive better service, perhaps because this is one of the last industries in which face-time is still common. However, once we break down those statistics according to each brand, we see a wider spectrum of scores, from 51% for McCormick & Schmicks, to 67% for Ruth’s Chris. In other words, some restaurants are more successful than others at creating a compelling customer experience.

What sets apart organizations with high Customer Engagement scores? What do they know about how to improve customer satisfaction? Well, it starts with a compelling business offer. Additionally, restaurants, like all organizations, must display consistent customer care that earns their customers’ trust.  Extraordinary, authentic employee effort is also key to engaging customers. These are the traits PeopleMetrics has found influences Customer Engagement, which in turn impacts such important business outcomes such as profit margins, share price, and ROI. (To learn more about these six traits for Customer Engagement, read our blog post, “Why the Ritz-Carlton is #1 in Customer Engagement: 6 Customer Love Factors in their Credo.”)

We have discovered a few “hot button” issues for restaurateurs, namely the business offer, consistency, customer care, and employee effort. (For a complete picture of our restaurant research, order a copy of our restaurant industry Most Engaged Customers report.) The compelling business offer at a restaurant might be superior food quality. One Ruth’s Chris guest gave insightful customer satisfaction feedback on the brand’s business offer, explaining, “There are no words to describe how good their steaks are. I don’t even want to try. And the desserts are heavenly.” A wide variety of menu choices and an enjoyable atmosphere are also viable business offers.

The most critical trait in the restaurant space is extraordinary extra effort from restaurant employees. As one Cheesecake Factory respondent put it, “They do everything in their power to make certain you have an outstanding time when eating in the restaurant. The staff is always helpful and friendly. They always seem to go above and beyond to make sure that everything is just right.” We have found that Engaged Employees foster engagement among customers as well. Some chains, such as Texas Roadhouse, engage employees through fun activities, including nightly in-house competitions and line dances in the dining room. Each restaurant is unique, so a strong Customer Engagement strategy begins with Employee Engagement research to determine what motivates employees. Ultimately, attentive, consistent, authentic service is what sets apart the restaurants with the most engaged customers.

Additional Resources
Replicating Brand Ambassadors through Recognize Alerts
How the Mode of Interaction Impacts Customer Engagement
Customer Satisfaction vs. Customer Engagement: Which Should You Follow?

[photo: Zoetnet]

“Success depends on effort,” advised Greek playwright Sophocles. When he penned those words, he probably didn’t imagine that they would ring true for the business world 2,000 years later, but indeed they do, and not just in an aphoristic sense. PeopleMetric’s 2010 Most Engaged Customers (MEC) study found that employees of companies with the highest Customer Engagement scores demonstrate extraordinary effort in meeting customer needs. Customers are more engaged when they can see that employees are trying hard to exceed their expectations.

To provide context, the 2010 MEC study found Effort is the fifth crucial ingredient in high Customer Engagement scores. After gathering more than 15,000 customer ratings for 67 brands, PeopleMetrics analyzed how the highest ranking companies achieved Customer Engagement and customer love. From this data, as detailed in the full Most Engaged Customers report, PeopleMetrics created a customer engagement model any company can follow. The model is based on a pyramid of traits companies must have in order to attain high Customer Engagement. Moving from the base to the fourth layer of the pyramid, companies must have a compelling business offer, a caring organization, consistent customer service, and high levels of customer trust in order to achieve gain engaged customers.

Employee effort is the fifth layer of the pyramid, and the step that moves customers from mere Satisfaction and Loyalty toward full Engagement. That matters because, unlike other customer satisfaction metrics, Customer Engagement has been tied to important business metrics including stock price, profit margin, share-of-market, and more. Overall, employee effort is difficult to achieve, but definitely worth it.

Our research of more than 60 brands across 12 industries uncovered three types of amazing employee effort:
1. Extraordinary Effort or Unexpected Acts of Kindness. When employees are willing to “go the extra mile,” customer engagement increases. As an example, one Trader Joe’s customer explained: “While we were there, they were offering samples of cookies, and my children did not like the variety they had offered for sample, so they offered another cookie, actually opening the package for us to try.”

2. Investing Extra Time to Serve the Customer. Money may talk, but time shouts—at least that’s what customers indicate with their engagement levels. An Allstate customer summarized the power of time, saying, “My reps will take their time in going over any questions I have. They also recently helped me with a tow on my vehicle. They went out of their way to offer to Google a tow company—provided me the number and had already called to confirm the company would be able to tow my vehicle within 30 minutes. THEY ARE AWESOME!!”

3. Employees Who Love Their Jobs So Much That Doing More Is Natural To Them. Here’s where Employee Engagement feeds Customer Engagement. Engaged Employees find it easy to put in extra effort for the customer. As one Wegmans customer put it, “They are on the like top 100 or 500 companies to work for, everyone I have ever encountered while in the store (employees) speaks kindly, is helpful, and even if it’s not their job will go out of their way to make sure you got the answer or found what you were looking for.”

Some things never change. Business success is indeed dependent on effort, as Sophocles wrote. When customers see employees working extra hard, they are more likely to be engaged. Consistent employee effort can dramatically improve Customer Engagement scores. By using feedback management products (such as PeopleMetrics’ Customer Engagement Management and Employee Engagement Management), companies can determine, track, and improve employee effort levels.

Additional Resources:
Achieve Customer Satisfaction and Customer Engagement Through a Compelling Business Offer
The Two Routes of Building Customer Trust
Consistency: Key to Building Customer Engagement

For the second year in a row, The Ritz-Carlton has won the top spot in PeopleMetrics’ Most Engaged Customers study. The 2010 MEC study found that 79% of Ritz-Carlton customers are engaged–that is, they demonstrate high loyalty/retention, effort, advocacy, and passion for the Ritz-Carlton. That the Ritz-Carlton offers unparalleled service is not news. What this year’s 2010 Most Engaged Customers study reveals is the reasons why the Ritz-Carlton continues to succeed, even as a luxury brand in these difficult economic times. By conducting interviews with over 5,000 customers, PeopleMetrics discovered that customer engagement is rooted in six different characteristics. The Ritz-Carlton’s Credo contains all six factors.

This Credo is essentially a mission statement. It is the promise that the Ritz-Carlton Ladies and Gentlemen make to their customers. Unlike many mission statements, however, the Ritz-Carlton Credo is actually a part of employees’ daily lives. Each morning, in a worldwide, all-staff meeting dubbed “the line-up,” the Credo is read aloud. Moreover, a pocket-sized card displaying the Credo is part of Ritz-Carlton employees’ daily uniform. Below, we analyze the Ritz-Carlton Credo according to the six factors the Most Engaged Customer study determined to be the crucial ingredients of Customer Engagement, or as we like to think about it, Customer Love.

1. The Offer. Before a customer can be engaged, he or she must be attracted to the brand by a compelling offer. The Ritz-Carlton’s offer is a luxurious experience. As one customer explained, “It’s a first-class experience.” In our full 2010 Most Engaged Customers report, we list six additional types of compelling experiences that can draw customers toward a certain brand.

2. Care. The first step toward customer loyalty is to express care for the customer. Does the company care about my business? customers ask themselves. Customer Care is the Ritz-Carlton’s highest mission, according to the company’s Credo.

3. Consistency. A compelling offer and customer care can’t guarantee long-term customer engagement and loyalty; for that, a company must achieve consistency. A single word in the Ritz-Carlton Credo, “always,” promises that Ritz-Carlton employees will deliver a caring, luxurious experience every time.

4. Trust. With the three traits listed above, a company can achieve customer satisfaction. To earn customer loyalty, the company must achieve customer trust. The 2010 Most Engaged Customers study found that trust is like the silver-lining of company errors; every service mistake is really an opportunity to win customer trust by making things right.  One Ritz-Carlton customer explained how the hotel won trust: “Years ago, I had a problem with a room at the hotel in Cancun. I was given 2 free nights to make up for it.” Clearly, Ritz-Carlton employees follow through on the Credo’s pledge to “fulfill even the unexpressed wishes and needs” of customers.

5. Effort. The final two ingredients in Customer Engagement are challenging to acheive, but absolutely crucial in attaining Customer Engagement. Extraordinary employee effort is one step toward Customer Engagement. Employees who go above and beyond their duties show the kind of effort that engages customers. This is where Employee Engagement contributes to Customer Engagement. Ritz-Carlton employees put extra effort into providing “the finest personal service” for their guests.

6. Genuine. Full Customer Engagement is achieved when customers find a company’s performance genuine. Customers can spot fake smiles. They love it when employees know them by name. They love it when employees treat them as a friend would. The Ritz-Carlton Credo prioritizes genuine service as the hotel’s highest goal, and Ritz-Carlton employees follow through on that promise.  As one Ritz-Carlton guest put it in the 2008 MEC study, “Everyone, including the maid, addresses me by name every time they see me. I always feel special, and always feel like I’ve come home again.” (Ritz-Carlton Guest)

PeopleMetrics’ Customer Engagement Management program is a customer engagement system that can help any company achieve the six traits listed above. Over the next few weeks, we’ll dive into more detail on the 2010 Most Engaged Customers study. For an industry-specific copy of the 2010 MEC report, contact us.

Additional Resources:
Ritz-Carlton Case Study: Luxury retailers know customer engagement
The Importance of Customer Engagement and Customer Satisfaction in Business Outcomes
Proactive Customer Management: Using Customer Feedback in Real Time

The human brain is wired for empathy. As Daniel Goleman explains in his book Social Intelligence, mirror neurons allow us to feel what the people around us are feeling. FMRI studies have shown that when we perceive emotions in others, our brains light up like theirs. For example, when you see a facial expression of disgust, the area of your brain that registers disgust is activated. To quote from Social Intelligence, mirror neurons “allow us to grasp the minds of others not through conceptual reasoning but through direct simulation, by feeling, not by thinking.” Why should mirror neurons matter to your business? Because your customers’ mirror neurons pick up on the emotional output of your employees. PeopleMetrics’ research verifies that enthusiastic, passionate employees rub off on customers. Employee Engagement breeds Customer Engagement. And companies with higher Customer Engagement also enjoy higher profits, ROI, and share-of-market. Therefore, Employee Engagement is a key component in any Customer Engagement strategy. Highly engaged employees act as ambassadors for your brand, advocating for your company to customers and fellow employees alike. That’s why PeopleMetrics has created a Brand Ambassador program to help you discover and “clone” your organization’s most engaged employees.

What does a Brand Ambassador look like? Well, one might sport a tattoo with the company logo. Another might inspire customers to write songs of praise. Literally–we’ve seen customers compose songs, complete with rhyming chorus and verses, in praise of extraordinary employees.  The point is, Brand Ambassadors are employees who consistently go the extra mile for customers and the company. They’re the ones you want other employees to emulate.

We help companies find Brand Ambassadors through our Customer Engagement Management solution. Here’s how it works. When a customer mentions a certain employee as providing exceptional service, our online CEM hub automatically sends out a Recognize Alert. Employees who receive a certain number of Recognize Alerts (as determined by the employer) are designated Brand Ambassadors. Public recognition of the Brand Ambassadors motivates Brand Ambassadors as well as other employees to provide stellar service. Beyond employee motivation, Brand Ambassadors are excellent sources of best practices information. Their expertise can be tapped to create solutions for common customer complaints. Our Customer Feedback Hub provides a common space for Brand Ambassadors to share which practices keep customers happy.

Too many companies gather customer feedback without using it to actually improve as an organization.  Through Brand Ambassador recognition, you can use customer feedback to find and learn from your top performers. Their insights can help you improve customer service, increase Customer Engagement, and increase overall sales and profits.

[photo: Zeetz Jones]

As our previous post, “Bridging the Engagement Gap with Positive Psychology,” explained, the millennial field of positive psychology examines how people can become happier by focusing on the meaningful, positive aspects of their lives. Researchers who study positive psychology ask how, why, and when positive emotions surface, and what individuals and institutions can do to increase happiness. Here at PeopleMetrics, we see happiness fitting into the passion part of our equation for Customer, Employee, and Physician Engagement. We weren’t surprised, then, to find that the founders of positive psychology also emphasize engagement.

First, let’s establish why employee engagement matters from a business perspective. PeopleMetrics has proven a connection between employee engagement and better business outcomes, including profitability and customer engagement. Research in positive psychology confirms this correlation; as Sue Shellenbarger writes for the Wall Street Journal, a 2004 study published in the journal American Behavioral Scientist found that “Teams with buoyant moods who encouraged each other earned higher profits and better customer satisfaction ratings.” As a final example of how employee mood figures into performance, the “Broaden and Build” tendency uncovered by positive psychologists shows that people who experience more joy and contentment in their lives are able to think more broadly and creatively (characteristics employers love to see).

The time is ripe to apply the lessons of positive psychology to the workplace. According to the Wall Street Journal article cited earlier, employee satisfaction is at an all-time low—just 45% of US workers are satisfied with their jobs, as compared to 52% of workers in 2005, and 61% in 1987. To raise that percentage among their employees, companies including American Express and UBS are hiring happiness coaches to teach the lessons of positive psychology.

When these happiness coaches present to work teams, they begin by exploring just what it means to be happy. According to an article published in the APA’s journal American Psychologist, positive psychologists have found three general types of happiness:

1. Positive Emotion/Pleasure—People find happiness through living a pleasant life.

2. Engagement—People feel happy when they can “lose themselves” in their work and activities.

3. Meaning—People experience happiness when they participate in what they feel are meaningful activities.

Positive psychologists have found that the happiest people among us exhibit all three types of happiness.

Managers can attempt to affect employee engagement by helping employees understand their role to the big picture by providing actionable, timely feedback and a variety of other methods.  PeopleMetrics Employee Engagement Management program helps managers pinpoint exactly what actions will be the most effective to increase engagement for their employees.

To identify the actions that will help increase Employee Engagement you must first understand how employees rate you on both the emotional and functional aspects of their employee experience.  That’s why we begin every Employee Engagement Management program with an employee survey. This establishes a baseline of Employee Engagement and gives employees the opportunity to provide feedback. Ongoing EEM research can help you better understand your employees’ needs—and, ultimately, create a happier more productive workforce.

Additional Resources:
The Link Between Employee Engagement and Customer Engagement
Fun: The Secret Ingredient in Employee Engagement
Brand Champions: When Employees Shine for the Company

Top photo by Jessica Tam.

Is your organization customer-focused?  This is a useful question anytime, but the recession of the last year has made your answer crucial. As the economy turns around, customer-centric organizations will be best equipped to take advantage of growing consumer confidence, as they will have the best understanding of the needs and wants of their audience. As Inc. magazine reported back in September, a few companies are actually growing in the recession. Some are forming new partnerships. Others are taking advantage of the talent in the marketplace and building a more effective workforce.  In this post, we’ll focus on a third route to recession success: developing new services that customers really want. For instance, a dry-cleaning company featured in the Inc. article is developing an online service to allow its customers to track when their dry cleaning order is ready.

As Nadine Heintz’s Inc. article shows, by devoting your energy to understanding customers now, you can position your organization to take full advantage of the eventual upturn. In other words, if you can successfully create a customer-centric organization, you can successfully generate sales to see you out of the recession.

There are two key variables in engineering a customer-centric organization: Customer Engagement and Employee Engagement.

Customer Engagement Management (CEM) is a customer-centric approach to recovering lost customers and acquiring new ones. By systematically researching how they interact with your products and services, CEM provides insight into the hearts and minds of your customers. It also provides your organization with tools for responding to customer concerns and triumphs in real time. To see what our latest Customer Engagement independent research will focus on, check out PeopleMetric’s 2010 Most Engaged Customers report.

Although nearly any organization can improve Customer Engagement through CEM, we have found that Customer Engagement scores improve even further when organizations also use Employee Engagement Management (EEM). EEM practices create a healthy organizational culture so that your employees feel passionate about their work.

Customer Engagement

Generally, an engaged customer is one who enthusiastically supports a service or product. Customer engagement is more than just brand loyalty, in which customers are making brand-exclusive purchases. Instead, engaged customers are actively supporting the company and telling others about available products and services. In short, the key to a successful business is engaged customers — people who zealously endorse what you do.

Unfortunately, companies often fail to recognize how their own procedures create apathetic customers. For instance, many organizations suffer from a lack of consistency regarding customer contact. Not only do they use multiple forms of media to communicate with their customers; they use multiple departments and personnel, too.  Nothing is more frustrating for a customer than a system that requires him or her to have three different encounters with three different employees, each of whom tells them something different. It’s easy to see why customers are willing to switch brands when faced with such poor customer service.

As customer-centric companies advocate for the customer throughout everything they do, a customer-centric organization wouldn’t put its customers through such complex communication structures. A CEM solution for such a problem would begin with talking to customers to find out how they feel, ideally through statistically consistent market research.  Before writing the customer questionnaire, leadership would identify customer touch points. After research had been completed, executives and managers would work with market researchers to determine which communication bottlenecks stand to impact customer engagement the most. Whichever area will specifically increase Customer Engagement would be given the most attention and resources.

CEM fosters a customer-centric culture because it helps you view your product or service as your customers do.  Instead of relying on generalizations or stereotypes, CEM recruits actual customers to help you accurately visualize your product. By doing this, you’ll remove the focus from “the company” and put it on the customer–exactly where it needs to be.

Employee Engagement

Whether they realize it or not, customers make most of their decisions based on their emotions–how they’re feeling at a given point in time–which is why Employee Engagement is a second key ingredient in creating a customer-centric culture. If employees are engaged, their interactions with customers will be genuine, not mere lip service. Customers notice and are pleased with such sincere, enthusiastic service.  As such, customer-centric organizations recognize that one of the major factors in generating Customer Engagement is Employee Engagement.

The first step in engaging employees is realizing that there is not a one-size-fits-all solution for every organization. Since every company’s organizational culture is different, every company’s employee engagement solution should look different as well. Your employees are unique, so your EEM solution should begin with asking them how you can help them feel engaged.  By understanding your employees and tracking their engagement over time, you will be able to support them in interactions with customers.

In the end, CEM and EEM shift what your organization focuses on.  And as countless motivational quotations proclaim, you become what you focus on.  By creating a positive work environment for your employees through EEM and directing them to dedicate themselves to the customer through CEM, you can create a customer-centric approach to lift you out of the economic doldrums. As PricewaterhouseCoopers analyst Ken Esch states in the Inc. article mentioned above, “Companies can build a strong competitive advantage during a recession. Many successful businesses got that way because they made a strategic decision during difficult times.”

Additional Resources:
The Link Between Employee Engagement and Customer Engagement
How to Build Employee Resistance, Even in a Recession
Growing Customers into Advocates

Top photo by Don Hankins.