How Employee Engagement Can Enhance Customer Experience

The legendary Jack Welch once said, “The essence of competitiveness is liberated when we make people believe that what they think and do is important – and then get out of their way while they do it.” Truer words were never spoken; yet why don’t more companies prioritise employee engagement?

The most critical component of a company is its people. Not only do employees represent the greatest annual expense, but also one of the best sources of ideas and innovation. They are often the first line of interaction and brand impression with customers. The most progressive organisations recognise the correlation between employee engagement and positive business outcomes like talent retention, customer satisfaction scores, and innovation. But despite this, few businesses have successful employee engagement, or Voice-of-the-Employee, programs. Fewer still harness employee insights to improve the customer experience.

Why Should You Care About Employee Engagement?

Given the enormous effort and expense that goes into hiring, training, and replacing employees, retention is critical to ensure a company’s future. That’s where employee engagement comes into play. Employee engagement programs accomplish four things:

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They Increase Motivation: When employees feel that they have a voice and that their opinions are heard, they are motivated to work harder.

They Increase Productivity: Engaged employees experience a greater sense of well-being that comes from feeling that they are making a difference.

They Increase Retention: Studies show that one of the top reason employees search for new jobs is feeling overlooked and underappreciated (it’s not all about money!).

They Improve the Bottom Line: According to the American Society for Training and Development, “higher reported levels of engagement are correlated with higher levels of market performance, as gauged by self reports in the areas of revenue growth, market share, profitability, and customer satisfaction.”

Let Them Be Heard… And Listen To What They Have To Say

Employee engagement focuses on the contributions that individuals make to the organisation, as well as on the personal satisfaction they experience in their jobs. Although participation and enthusiasm are outward-facing, and fulfillment comes from within, the two are intrinsically intertwined. The more individuals feel that they contribute to the success of the company, the more satisfaction they feel. The happier they are in their positions, the more likely they are to engage positively with peers, management, and customers.

In today’s competitive business climate, a motivated and dedicated workforce is vital to business survival, yet infinitely more challenging to achieve and sustain given cutbacks, salary freezes, and layoffs. Consider these statistics from a 2010 Gallup Poll on employee engagement in the United States: 29 percent of employees are engaged; 54 percent are not engaged; 17 percent are disengaged.

Organisations have their work cut out for them to bring disenchanted and detached workers back into the fold. Businesses must give employees every opportunity to be heard, and demonstrate that they are truly listening to what they have to say.

How To Create An Intelligent Employee Engagement Program

Traditionally, organisations use conventional tools to gauge attitudes at each phase of the employee experience cycle: surveys, and performance management systems, interview notes, to name a few. The problem with relying solely on these tools is that they are inefficient, costly, typically focused on structured scores (rate on a scale of 1-5), not scalable, and severely limited in the types of sources and data they could analyse. They do not really listen to what employees are saying. They aren’t looking across the employee base to understand where employees are challenged or thriving and they aren’t measuring employee sentiment or emotion. Traditional tools only tell part of the story.

The next generation of employee engagement – Intelligent Employee Engagement – is the use of sentiment and text analytics technology to create a centralised, holistic process for intelligent listening, analysing, operationalising, and measuring of the Voice-of-the-Employee. I’ve worked with hundreds of companies on creating employee and customer engagement programs and have come up with a checklist of key things to look for in a sentiment and text analytics technology:

Can it help you listening intelligently? Employee feedback data floods in through different sources (think emails, employee portals, social media, surveys, etc.), in different formats, and in different languages. Does your technology allow you to set up a single, multi-listening post for all internal and external and structured and unstructured data over multiple sources in any language?

Can it help you analyse intelligently? Since organisations are drowning in data, powerful analytics can help identify and focus on the employee insights that are the most relevant and actionable – the RIGHT information, where is the insight coming from, when, and why.

Can it help you operationalise intelligently? Valuable insights are useless if they are not shared across the organisation. You need to get the right information to the right people at the right time. By routing employee feedback to the appropriate stakeholders, you bolster cross-departmental collaboration to solve complex business problems. And because you have access to real-time, actionable employee feedback, you are also allowing for real-time employee engagement.

Can it help you measure intelligently? Measuring and documenting every touch point of the employee engagement cycle is imperative. This is about employing tools to help you measure sentiment, volume, satisfaction changes, and your Return-on-Action.

Using Employee Insights To Enhance Customer Experience

I made the case for how employee engagement programs, when coupled with the right sentiment and text analytics technology, can benefit employee retention and loyalty. But now let’s think about how it benefits the customer experience.

Engaged employees are critical components of a successful customer experience program. Their informed opinions on everything from how to improve customer service to how to stock an eye-catching display can be nuggets of gold to a company that will listen. Employees typically raise issues weeks to months ahead of customers and can get organisations to provide a positive customer experience proactively rather than reactively.

Unfortunately, the majority of programs do not incorporate the valuable feedback from customer-facing employees. Instead, decisions are made by management, who many never come into contact with actual customers. Bad idea; scratch that – HORRIBLE idea. Employees on the front lines can provide insights that management simply cannot.

Employee-Centric CEM – A Real-World Case

One of the largest, multinational retailers of technology and entertainment products and services (for the sake of anonymity, we’ll call it “Company X”) employs 180,000 people worldwide. Company X implemented a CEM program that hinged on the employee feedback it received through its sentiment and text analytics solution on a daily basis to track issues in real-time.

Employee feedback is gathered from a variety of sources, including forums, surveys, texting/SMS, focus groups and councils, phone calls, in-store, and over email. Employees are motivated to enter feedback because they see their store and district managers make changes based on the information.

A dedicated analyst team focuses on key trends from categories like products, promotions, policies, and merchandising. The team also creates “spike” reports when a particular issue requires deeper analysis. Reports are sent to the stores each week and the team makes recommendations to corporate based on the insights it receives.

Company X receives between 3,500 and 4,000 insights per week from their employees, and the findings have led to numerous changes to ensure a positive customer experience. For example, employees at one store reported customer frustration with the in-store pickup process and told senior leadership. The district managers then went to the store to work with the employees who submitted the issue. They started a taskforce aimed at improving the in-store pickup process, and eventually the store saw a 30 percent increase in the number of customers using the service.

When people ask me what I do for a living, I say, “I market the best people, company, and products in the world so that organisations can provide the best customer experience possible.” And it’s true, because without the first, the other two cease to exist. As the marketplace becomes even more competitive and the cost of doing business escalates, retaining happy, empowered employees is a priority. Capturing the intelligence contained in employee feedback can make all the difference in maintaining a positive and productive workforce while limiting turnover costs. And the fact that it can improve customer experience initiatives as well is reason enough for making intelligent employee engagement a top priority for your organisation.

Melissa Pippine is Vice President of Marketing at Clarabridge.