Five Ways To Treat Employees Like Customers

Do you treat your employees like your customers?

Perhaps that’s a bit of a loaded question. It could be that your organization treats customers like months-old rotted fish. If that’s the case your employees are the least of your problems so go and fix that……seriously, go and fix it.

Good. You’re still here. Let’s start by asking a few questions:

• If you learn that a customer is dissatisfied with your service, what do you do to make things right?
• If you learn that a customer is no longer buying your product or service and is now going elsewhere, what do you do to change that?
• If you learn your overall customer satisfaction is lower than you want, how long do you take before you decide to do something about it?

Okay, now let’s swap out customer for employee and answer these questions again. Do you approach them with a similar mindset? What if your organization applied the same degree of focus on the internal retention of employees as it does on the external retention of customers? Stephen Covey wrote a few years ago:

Some organizations talk a lot about the customer, and then neglect the employees who deal with the customer. This mindset produces unmotivated employees, worker-manager disputes and poor business results.

If you’ve been unknowingly neglecting the folks inside your organization…it’s okay. You can begin to make things better right now with just a few bold changes.

1. Make employee satisfaction everyone’s job. Just as customer satisfaction should be owned throughout the organization and not the exclusive concern of one team or department, the same must be said for employee satisfaction. Don’t make the mistake of thinking this is solely a human resource issue. Every single manager and leader must be responsible for the well-being and care of employees.

2. Find out how your employees are doing. Savvy organizations employ a wide variety of more traditional tools such as surveys, interviews, and focus groups to determine the state of customer satisfaction. Now, put these methods to work inside your organization. Start by having an open dialogue with employees (note that if this is something new in your organization, you’re going to also need to build trust in order to get candid responses). Schedule regularly occurring organization-wide town hall sessions devoted to workplace issues, successes, and challenges. And even though I’m not a fan of employee surveys, they can be effective in support of these other information gathering methods.

3. Make social media one cornerstone of your strategy. Don’t worry about whether or not you understand social media…I’m suggesting that you apply some guiding principles that drive it. These principles include authenticity, transparency, and shared ownership. Appreciate and encourage informal connections between employees and managers, particularly connections outside the more formal hierarchical lines. Lead the kind of change in how people within your organization relate to each other.

4. Communicate openly and often. If your customers hate being left in the dark about how you plan to improve their experience, your employees hate it even more. Don’t be a miser with information, even if you think it’s unimportant. Publish your plan for everyone to see, show the positive progress, show the places where things aren’t going as smooth, and be upfront with lessons that are being learned along the way. When there’s an absence of information, employees will definitely create whatever they want to fill that vacuum.

5. Finally, take decisive action. If you introduce these initiatives into your working culture, it’s absolutely necessary to take swift and consistent action. The key to success will likely rest in whether employees feel these changes are authentic and not just another “flavor of the month” activity from management. Empathize with your employees who may have been snakebit by change initiatives in the past and may view this with a wary and skeptical eye.

Remember that creating a passionate and remarkable customer experience begins with truly passionate and remarkable employees and working culture.

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At Connection Cafe: Don’t Take Your Staff’s Engagement For Granted

Today I published my first post for the Connection Cafe, Convio’s company blog. I’m hoping it gets some energetic and passionate comments so head over there and start a dialogue.

Connection Cafe is largely written to the nonprofit audience, but if you’re from the corporate world don’t let that scare you off. I’ll be dealing with the same themes there as I do here with Bailey WorkPlay…but more pointed to the NPO crowd.

Here’s a snippet:

But then, I would follow this with something usually less obvious: without an engaged staff, there would be no members wanting to bring their dues, participation, and energetic passion. Too often, professional associations and non-profits expend so much of their focus on what lies outside, they can overlook the very people who make things happen inside every single day (don’t worry, for-profits are not immune either). There’s a reason why many non-profits are not run solely by members or volunteers. It’s because the professional paid staff have the experience, skills, and talents to help members and volunteers achieve great organizational goals.

Go read the whole post…

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Every Single Person Is Responsible For Customer Experience

Here’s a question that I’ve been pondering for a while and it just resurfaced lately. When management makes a person or a department responsible for customer satisfaction as their primary function, does that inadvertently absolve others of that responsibility? It was an issue I always struggled with as a membership development professional in the non-profit world and I also see it playing out in customer service departments in for-profits.

I guess the answer is that it all depends on the culture of the organization and whether that culture emphasizes that each person who enters immediately understands that no matter what their position is…providing a remarkable customer experience is task #1.

Yet, how many organizations can we personally count that have this type of culture? I don’t just mean they have a nice wall plaque stating that everyone is responsible for customer service; I mean actual living, thriving culture where this is acted out every single day. When you move on to the second hand, please let me know because you’ve just won a prize. And if your own organization is present as one of those fingers, you’ve won the grand prize…and I really want to talk to you because you have a story to share.

If you really want to improve the customer experience, start here: make it clear that every single position in the organization is customer-facing and responsible for their satisfaction. From the CEO to the guy who makes sure your IT infrastructure works, regardless of the position within the company everyone may be called on to speak to a customer about their experience, listen to a complaint, or gather their feedback about new ideas.

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