It’s time for brands to recognise that they can’t deliver a great customer experience without a great employee experience, as attendees at an exclusive CX50 virtual roundtable discussed.
What if customer experience doesn’t, in fact, start with the customer? That was the proposal made by Roy Capon, CEO of Zone and UK head of Cognizant Digital Experience, at an exclusive virtual roundtable hosted as part of the DX Summit at the Festival of Marketing.
Capon suggested: “Maybe we’ve been looking at the problem the wrong way round for quite some time. Businesses strive to be customer-centric, but maybe they should be employee-centric?”
It was clear from the views of the attendees that leading brands are already recognising the central role employees play in customer experience. The event took place to celebrate the achievements of this year’s CX50 list – the UK’s top 50 customer experience professionals, as selected by Marketing Week in partnership with Zone and parent company Cognizant Digital Experience.
“Employees make hundreds of decisions every day that affect the customer experience.”
— Tete Soto, O2
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Behind every great customer experience is an engaged employee
CX50 — 2021
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“We take a lot of care to listen to what employees have to say because they’re the ones on the front line,” revealed O2’s director of transformation, Tete Soto. “Employees make hundreds of decisions every day that affect the customer experience and they are an integral part of how we design it.”
Transferring some of a brand’s focus from the customer onto the employee is a multifaceted challenge, and one that roundtable attendees admitted involved a wide range of moving parts. They agreed that getting employees on board starts, however, with culture.
“It’s the bleeding obvious,” stated Mark Evans, managing director of marketing and digital at Direct Line Group. “If people aren’t at one with their employer, why would they bother? In what can be repetitive, hard work, pride is vital. It helps to give the extra bit of discretionary effort.”
Jodie Locking, head of technology and digital customer experience at Morrisons, agreed that it’s all about “being clear on the purpose and serving customers better. It could be a delivery driver or the colleagues in-store. Listening and responding to what they have to say is what Morrisons has been great at this year.”
Ocado Retail’s chief customer officer, Laura Harricks added: “We’re big believers in value-driven culture and then getting the culture to meet opportunities. Whether it’s the customer service team members [delivery drivers] going the extra mile to manage customer expectations, or the CRM team, if you line up the culture of what’s expected with opportunities – that’s where the magic comes to life.”
The culture power boost
Suggesting that culture alone is enough to drive employees to go the extra mile consistently does have a slightly cultish feel to it. Each executive admitted that incentivisation also plays a role to one degree or another. “There is always a basket of KPIs” that have to be measured and rewarded, Soto admitted, but added that other incentives are also important: “We do go out and give prizes such as our Blue Chair awards [recognising customer service excellence].”
Morrisons’ Locking agreed, noting: “Our colleagues are incentivised in different ways but [that includes] recognising them in small ways – a voucher for a coffee for example – to say thank you and keep morale going. It’s not always about cash.”
Capon said: “You can reward people in different ways – through growth and development, and ultimately feeling like you’re achieving your potential as an employee. The notion of purpose is just as important as a monetary [incentive].”
Evans pointed out that it can be hard to recognise employee excellence when you tie them to a single scale, such as rating people from one to 10. Moderately good customer service could easily achieve a 10, but then how do companies recognise employees who go the extra mile – or 300, in the case of one who travelled that far to bring a spare set of keys to a customer of Green Flag, Direct Line Group’s breakdown insurance brand?
Ocado’s Harricks argued it’s an imperfect science: “The whole organisation has NPS and colleague engagement scores as part of their KPIs but we’ve not completely cracked it. This year, we’re making NPS part of everyone’s remit, which is a powerful thing, for everyone to think ‘I have ownership of this’.”
Break down communication barriers
However, for several executives it was the presence of creative and collaborative internal communications team that was key. “For me, the best partners in the organisation to support this are the internal communications team. They are the ones that develop the mechanics that help us land these messages,” Soto explained.
Direct Line’s Evans added that their remit is every bit as innovative as their external communications cousins. “Internal communications is synonymous with what you’re doing externally. We try to be quite innovative and we encourage people to go for awards, or we launch internal apps that gamify new propositions.” He was unequivocal about the value they deliver: “Without internal communications, I don’t know how we’d get that feel-good factor about our news.”
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Put the right tools in employees’ hands
Helping employees understand what the customer experiences and then how they’re expected to respond is critical. It not only enables them to manage expectations externally, it also helps them understand their role and their value – as well as helping them execute their tasks with aplomb.
Babylon Health CMO Adam Rostom related his past experience at Dyson, where every new employee joins the production line to build a vacuum cleaner. It’s not about turning everyone into an engineer, “it gives you an intimate understanding of the product”, he explained. Getting out of comfortable silos is another of his passion points: “Being comfortable is not going to get you anywhere; making sure people get real exposure to customers helps boost both employee engagement and customer experience. It breaks the humdrum,” he said.
Evans agreed that comfort isn’t always the aim, with the company engaging in regular sessions where executives get into the weeds about strategies that haven’t gone to plan, sparing no blushes. It’s the only way to make sure change happens, he insisted.
Equally, this is not just about beefing up the induction process – employee engagement is an ongoing process. Patti Alderman, AVP of Cognizant Digital Experience, added: “I’m excited that people understand the investment in brand through behaviour and culture for employees. It’s the glue between customers and employees. Immersing in experience once is important but ongoing immersion is key - making sure it’s not a one-time activity.”
Culture, they always say, comes from the top, and the roundtable attendees noted that employee engagement couldn’t get off the ground if it weren’t recognised as strategically important by board-level leaders.
“If you want to make sure something lands, it needs to have the right sponsorship,” Soto said, with Rostom adding: “If you lead by example, the rest of the business will follow.” Many attendees noted that their remuneration was dependent – at least in part – on both customer experience and employee engagement, with some formalising the latter in the form of employee NPS.
“Making sure people get real exposure to customers helps boost both employee engagement and customer experience.”
— Adam Rostom, Babylon Health
It’s also a case of these professionals being the translator between business and employee, Alderman suggested: “Internal communications makes sure that we’re speaking with candour and helping employees understand what’s going on with the business. Some companies are wrapped up with corporate speak so we need to be clear and simple in our communications.”
It has been a challenging, topsy-turvy time during the pandemic and there are now many more puzzles to work out – not least how to deal with the enduring hybrid workforce and meet escalating customer expectations based on the massive shift to digital. Some, like Rostom, also have to navigate huge growth, with Babylon recently growing 400%. He likened it to “having to keep an eye on the customer while you’re onboard a rocket ship”.
Locking noted that it’s important to “sustain momentum” and make the most of opportunities that may have come out of nowhere. “We gained a lot over the last 14 months,” she said, but added that there were unexpected changes in customer behaviour to deal with and there will be more to come.
Evans concluded: “Never lose sight of the fact that you’ll never have it sussed. Stay a little bit paranoid. It takes constant work.”■