In today’s challenging economy, companies must deliver a truly compelling and
differentiated customer experience if they are to survive and thrive. Indeed, most
companies understand that they need to actively engage their customers to build
loyalty, deepen relationships, and gain access to insights that inspire future actions.
While companies have had “close to the customer” initiatives for years, it is increasingly clear that true customer engagement depends on the simultaneous engagement of employees. In fact, research from ASTD (American Society for Training & Development) reveals that 83 percent of managers consider engaged employees a critical factor in attracting and retaining customers.
The reality of the workplace, however, is quite different. While managers believe that engaged employees are critical, there is strong indication that organizations are not doing an effective job of creating engagement. Only 21 percent of employees are fully engaged, according to research by Towers Perrin.
Though organizations need engaged employees to engage customers, organizations are not rising to meet this challenge or taking the steps needed to engage employees. This creates a significant challenge for all organizations, particularly as an uncertain economy pressures
them to make morale-draining cutbacks. To continually excel and win, organizations must accept that engaged customers are necessary but not sufficient to create success, and must
work simultaneously to actively engage both customers and employees. Thus, the critical question is not whether there is a link between employee and customer engagement, but what to do about it.
Escalating Expectations and the Engagement Imperative
Customer Engagement
Several years ago, marketing expert Theodore Levitt offered a model focused on how to create competitive advantage through differentiation. In his research, Levitt discovered that companies cannot engage customers merely by providing products and services that meet current customer expectations—what he calls the “Expected Offering.” Rather, they must deliver what Levitt refers to as the “Potential Offering”— features, capabilities, and characteristics that meet unspoken or unanticipated customer needs that even the
customer might not be aware of.
Product enhancements today occur much faster than when Levitt first introduced his model; therefore, the model gives an incomplete picture of the current environment. Even the Potential Offering can be rapidly eroded by competitors. As a result, companies need deeper insight into customers’ concerns, interests, preferences, and priorities so they can identify the “Future Potential Offering,” as well as today’s Potential Offering.
“There is nothing more important than getting the right people, in the right jobs,
with the right development and with the high levels of engagement. Everything else – superior customer service, profitable growth, return on shareholder value and brand – happens from there.” Roy Vallee CEO, Avnet, Inc.
Because of these escalating expectations, organizations must develop more intimate relationships with customers, encouraging them to more freely share information that points to future desires. While reaching high levels of customer satisfaction was an admirable objective in the past, the bar for success is now much higher.
Today, customer engagement is critical if organizations are to continue developing and delivering experiences that produce profitable, long-term relationships with customers.
When we use the expression “customer engagement,” we go beyond the traditional definition of customer satisfaction.
By engaging customers an organization: `
Inspires an emotional connection
Creates a consistent customer experience through the integration of its products, processes, and personal connections
Enables and encourages customers to involve themselves as extensions of the organization
Employee Engagement
Of equal importance to customer engagement is understanding employee engagement. While not its intended purpose, we have found that the Levitt model also can be used to describe the challenge of employee engagement. If employers only deliver fair compensation, good working conditions, and reasonably effective leadership—the Expected Offering—they may have satisfied employees, but not engaged employees. Organizations and managers need to ask themselves, “What do my employees need to be fully engaged?”
To answer this question, organizations must determine what the Potential Offering is that creates employee engagement. Beyond the expected, the “Potential Job” might anticipate aspects of the employment experience that even the employee has not fully considered, including both tangible and intangible items. For example, people might want a job where they can develop new skills, use cutting-edge technologies, contribute to improving society, or be part of a work environment where they can collaborate and make a difference.
Just as with customer engagement, employee engagement goes beyond employee satisfaction.
Organizations that engage employees:
Inspire an emotional connection to the organization’s vision and purpose.
Lead employees to commit their full energy to their work.
Create loyalty and commitment to the organization.
So, what will it take to reach these levels of engagement?
What must happen to address the growing expectations of both customers and employees in today’s highly competitive marketplace?
What strategic actions can organizations take now to set the stage for continuing success?
Meeting and Exceeding Engagement Expectations
Our experience working with organizations around the world has led us to a clear understanding about how to create customer and employee engagement.
Leveraging our extensive research and experience, Wilson Learning has created a roadmap for customer and employee engagement that we call the Customer
Engagement Model.
CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT
Processes
Personal Connection
EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT
Engagement
Culture
Results
Market Share
Repeat Business
More Referrals
Profitability
Products
Leadership Effectiveness
First, it is important to begin with an understanding of where your organization wants to go. That is, what will be the results of better customer engagement?
Will it be greater market share, better customer-back market data, or being customers’ preferred provider and trusted advisor?
By creating clarity about the results and how they are measured, organizations can evaluate their efforts to create engagement.
Once the results have been identified and defined, your organization needs to define engagement expectations for both your customers and employees. We encourage organizations to take time and document what they believe these expectations are, and then verify their beliefs through surveys or focus groups with customers and employees. These expectations are as often unstated as stated, so effective probing and discovery is often necessary. Once these expectations are clear, your organization can begin
the process of building the business to meet these requirements. You do this by aligning products, processes, and personal connections.
Engagement with your products, processes, and personal connections is more like multiplication than addition. Fail to engage in any area, and you don’t engage at all. For example, your company can have the most engaging products and processes, but if you fail to make the personal connection, you will never achieve high levels of engagement with customers.
How do you create alignment? By asking yourself how customers experience the Potential and Future Potential Offering defined by your products, processes, and personal connections.
Products:
What are the distinctive qualities in your products that go beyond mere functionality and expected quality? These might be based on design aesthetics, innovation, or even a compelling corporate vision that your product or service supports. The question to ask yourself is “What truly differentiates our offering from our competitors’ offerings?”
Processes:
How engaging is the total customer experience, from the initial search, to the decision to buy, and finally to the use of your product or service?
Do your processes encourage and motivate a customer to want to engage with you? This goes beyond just making it easy to do business with you or to resolve problems. Companies should ask themselves, “Do our processes help customers identify potential needs or form an emotional connection to our organization?”
Personal Connections:
This involves more than just being courteous. It’s about providing a powerful
human connection that deepens the buyer’s sense of trust and confidence in the organization. Are your customer-contact employees empowered to solve customer problems and create value-add opportunities?
Does your organization create the sense that the customer has had an experience
personalized just for him or her?
In essence, it is about the customer seeing your employees as a source of advantage to them. Every employee needs to know the impact of products, processes, and personal connections and how they contribute to the customer’s level of engagement. The programmer who designs the Web site or the accountant who sends out bills can have as much impact on engagement as a salesperson or customer service representative in direct contact with customers.
Therefore, parallel with creating customer engagement, organizations need to focus on creating employee engagement.
Employee engagement comes from two main sources:
Leadership Effectiveness:
Leaders are accountable for engaging others in committing their full energy
to create value and success. You cannot have engaged employees without engaged leaders who communicate an inspiring vision, manage to a clear set of goals and objectives, facilitate collaboration across the organization, and make sound business decisions.
Engagement Culture:
An organization’s culture also has a great influence on employee and customer
engagement. The organization supports a culture of engagement through the way employee actions and goals are reinforced, recognized, and rewarded. Leaders and employees alike share responsibility for cultivating the values and principles important to the organization.
Taking Action: How to Create Customer Engagement
Understanding the factors that create customer engagement is only part of the story. To engage customers, you have to take action to create customer and employee engagement. In our work helping clients create greater customer engagement, we often begin with a series of questions. The answers to these questions help focus your actions and provide metrics to gauge the impact of your efforts.
A. Setting the Stage
1. What are the business results you intend to achieve through greater customer engagement?
It is important to be as specific and measurable as possible. Don’t be satisfied with “greater market share”; put a figure on it: “Raise market share by 5-10 percent.”
2. How do/will you know customers are engaged? What will be the major indicators that your customers have formed an emotional connection to your company, are having a consistent experience with your organization’s processes, and are advocates for your company? What metrics will you use? How will you gather that information?
3. How do/will you know your employees are engaged? What will be the major indicators that your employees have formed an emotional connection to the organization, are committing their full energy, and are loyal to the organization? How will you know?
4. What are the engagement expectations of customers and employees? Do you have this
documented in a “value proposition,” or, for employees, a set of values or operating principles? Where do you have this documented? This is a critical step that is often missed.
B. Customer Engagement
1. How do your products provide you with a clear competitive advantage? That is, what are your Potential Offering and Future Potential Offering?
2. What areas of the total customer experience need to be enhanced? It can be helpful to map all the ways a customer can interact with your organization (Web-site, customer support, sales, billing, etc.) and see if these avenues support the engagement expectations.
3. Do your customer-contact people epitomize the engagement expectations? How do you know that the people with the personal connection to the customer have the skills and the perspective to deliver on the engagement expectations? What skills need to be developed?
C. Employee Engagement
1. How do you know if your leaders and managers have the ability to fully engage employees?
Have you defined and assessed the leadership skills your organization needs?
2. What actions can you take to build an engagement culture?
If your organization wants increased market share, repeat business, and profitability, you need engaged employees and customers. Eighty-three percent of managers consider engaged employees a critical factor in attracting and retaining customers, and yet, only 21 percent of employees are fully engaged. What would it mean to your organization to move from 21 percent to 30 percent, or to 50 percent of employees fully engaged? How much impact would that make?
Organizations often neglect the link between employee and customer engagement in difficult economic times. By asking, then addressing, the questions above, clients we have worked with have proven, time and time again, that customer engagement is critical to success, and customer engagement does not exist without employee engagement.
© 2009 Wilson Learning Worldwide Inc.
This article is reproduced with the permission of Wilson Learning, if you would like more information on the services of Wilson Learning and/or more information on how to get more engagement from your people please contact rachelc@nowtraining.co.uk or call 01920 460211.
