Is customer experience everyone’s job? The answer to that question is a little complicated – it’s yes and no.
It’s a little too easy to say it’s everyone’s job, because then it becomes way too easy for it to become nobody’s job. Without leadership, customer experience is a nice idea but never executed.
The best organisations focus on customer experience throughout the entire business, not just in traditionally customer-facing roles.
How can developing leaders help create a customer-centric organisation? By ensuring learning involves customer experience ideas – and real data, skills and outcomes – for staff and employees who sit outside the departments we consider customer-facing.
Instead of customer service training for those who are front and centre in your store, think of customer experience training for your bench jewellers.
What if we could get everyone who works at your company to think about their specific role with the customer?
Here are three ways to help your non-customer-facing teams connect with their role in your customer-centric business.
1. Connect the dots of how their daily work connects with the customer’s actual experience.
“Customer experience doesn’t apply to me. I handle just internal tech support.” A well-meaning but misguided employee shared this gem with me. He was setting up the equipment for a workshop I was conducting with the customer experience leadership at his organisation.
I started asking him about some of the biggest challenges he faced in his role at a large, complex organisation.
My new friend shared how he was the “Plan B”, which meant 90 per cent of his work was about fixing things when they didn’t work.
He mentioned sales and customer support, specifically, because they were impatient and panicked by the time he was called to help.
Why were they panicked? Because a customer is there, waiting for them.
See where I’m going here? My new friend didn’t see how his role in helping these teams respond to customers during crises was vital to delivering a superior customer experience.
He didn’t see how the work of his daily tasks – keeping technology updated, responding to challenges internally, actually helped the entire organisation live up to their promise to customers.
It’s up to you, as a leader, to connect these dots on a regular basis within your business.
Your bookkeeper needs to understand that by paying invoices correctly and on time, they are protecting important partnerships and supplier relationships that ultimately serve the customer.
This means that responding to questions and answering emails from confused partners or suppliers represents the business promise to these customers, too.
2. Customer experience is a business discipline, not a project.
Indeed, it’s a discipline with real outcomes and measurements. Everyone in your organisation is aware when your revenue numbers decline or when you exceed your sales projections.
That’s because everyone understands that without sales and revenue, there is no business. The same can be said for happy customers.
And yet we treat them as a nice-to-have. Explain the important customer experience metrics in your organisation to everyone.
Share those metrics throughout your organisation so there’s an awareness of what matters.
3. Communicate about customer experience like it’s trending.
Leaders often start a “campaign” about customer experience. Maybe there’s an article sent to everyone by email, or a mention in the all-hands meeting.
Perhaps a certain year has been declared “year of the customer”, so there are posters in the hallways and a banner across the company homepage.
But communicating without training is like yelling, “cut down that tree”, and expecting it to happen. Customer experience is about so much more than promises. We have to know how to live up to those promises. Customer experience should be woven into most communications internally.
- How will this affect the customer?
- Will this new process create more or less effort for our customers?
These are the questions you must ask as a leader, and ask them over and over and over again.
The best leaders create cultures where everyone in the organisation is willing to deliver on the customer experience because there’s no doubt that it’s a priority.
This means communicating about it like you do regarding the overall health of your business.
Customer experience only really works if your staff is focused and willing to put in the effort needed to deliver on it. That is true for every employee within your business.
Read eMag