photo credit: opensourceway
Earlier today Edelman, the global PR form, launched the results of it’s 2012 Trust Barometer. According to Edelman:
“This year’s survey is bigger than ever before, with 30,000 people questioned in 25 countries. The Barometer reveals the state of Trust in business and institutions.”
I’ve written about this survey before in Your Internal Brand is One of Your Most Important Marketing Tools and refer to Edelman’s survey results in my eBooks (You can check them out for free here and here).
However, reading through the survey results today there were three things that jumped out at me and have implications for building customer and employee engagement:
- Skepticism is rife and trust is not easily won. The majority of people need to see something 5 or 6 time before they start to believe and trust in it. Therefore, the need for consistency of message, to keep showing up with the same message and via a number of sources is key to building trust
- People trust people like them. The survey shows that, whilst academics and company technical experts continue to be broadly trusted, people are more likely to trust ‘People like them’ than the CEO. Given the flow of trust away from the boardroom businesses should work with their teams to give them the freedom, ability and tools to reach out, speak with and engage their customers. Doing this just might prove to be less controlling and more engaging for them too.
- Many business are failing to meet changing expectations. When asked what elements are important to building trust – listening to customers, high quality products or services, treating employees well and customers ahead of profits – topped the poll as being important to business. However, the survey results also show that the general population, whilst considering these things as important, say that most businesses are failing to meet their expectations and need to work harder. For many companies this will mean one of two things: 1. They need to start really doing what they say they are going to do and making sure their customers understand what they are doing; and 2. They need to start talking to customers to get a better understanding of their expectations and how they can meet them. Because if they don’t then someone else will.
Note: Whilst these are the results from the Global survey, I looked at the UK-specific results too and they follow the same trends.
If you want to read more, you head over to the Edelman site and download the Executive Summary here or view the presentation on Slideshare here.
Do take the opportunity to check out the survey results for yourself or share your thoughts on my conclusions in the comments below.
photo credit: elyse patten
Following on from my last post and the theme that it started to explore, I would like to present to you a guest post from Jon Gordon. I’m very excited and this is a bit of coup for me as Jon is a Wall Street Journal and international bestselling author of a number of books. You can find out more about Jon via the links below.
The Greatest Customer Service Strategy
Smiling is important. Eye contact matters. Patience is essential. Being warm and friendly is a must. And providing a positive emotional experience for your customers is a priority.
But these are not the greatest of customer service strategies. Ironically the greatest of all strategies has nothing to do with customers and everything to do with employees.
The Greatest Strategy is this: Great customer service begins with being employee focused first and customer focused second. If you treat your employees well, they will treat their customers well.
Too often businesses, hospitals, restaurants and organisations focus all their energy on the customer while ignoring the very employees that serve their customers. This may work in the short run but eventually employees become tired, burned out, negative and resentful.
Just the other day I was speaking at a hospital and was told that they were doing patient satisfaction surveys as a way to improve nurse performance. “What about nurse satisfaction surveys,” I asked. “No we’re not doing that,” they said. The problem was clear. Measuring patient satisfaction will not make nurses more energised, positive and attentive.
Patient satisfaction will go up when nurse satisfaction goes up.
I have found that organisations who deliver the best service also have the best culture where employees are valued, listened to and cared for and in turn these employees value, care for and serve their customers.
Best Buy, for example, started to measure the engagement of their employees and in the process saw service and profits improve. T-Mobile dramatically improved and transformed their customer service when they improved the culture in their call centres by listening to their employees. Southwest Airlines has built their success on the foundation of an employee-first culture.
Of course we need to train our employees to do all the things that make for a great customer experience.
There are great books on the essentials of creating a great customer experience.
But most of all remember if you model great service, your people will share it.
So, if you want your team to serve, serve them.
If you want your people to care, care about them.
If you want your team to love their work, love them.
If you want your employees to be their best, give them your best.
If you take care of your people they will take care of your customers.
About Jon Gordon:
This post is a guest post by Jon Gordon. Jon is the Wall Street Journal and international bestselling author of a number of books including The Energy Bus: 10 Rules to Fuel Your Life, Work and Team with Positive Energy, and his latest, The Seed: Finding Purpose and Happiness in Life and Work. Learn more at www.JonGordon.com. Follow Jon on Twitter @JonGordon11 or Facebook www.facebook.com/jongordonpage .
photo credit: canonsnapper
A couple of days ago I was asked to go and speak to a large financial services firm about engagement, both customer engagement and employee engagement and the link between the two of them.
What was and is interesting is the rising consciousness amongst many firms of how connected employee engagement is to delivering a great customer experience, customer service, retention, loyalty and, thus sustainable business performance.
Moreover, Bruce Temkin in a recent blog post (Discussing 13 Customer Experience Megatrends), puts ‘Employee engagement enlightenment’ at the top of his draft list of 13 Customer Experience Megatrends, which his research tells him “will have a significant effect on customer experience over the next few years.”
Isn’t all of this self-evident?
I mean, how can we expect employees to take care of customers if the business does not trust, recognise, support and treat them well too?
Or, is it more complicated than that?
Many businesses will look for process, system and technology fixes and assume that more and better internal communications or more surveys will increase engagement. It might. But, I don’t think there will be any guarantees with those type of initiatives.
Why? Well, if we look at different sources of what drives engagement:
- Wikipedia’s entry on The Drivers of Engagement
- Scarlett Surveys: 15 Engagement Drivers & their Effect on Employee Engagement Levels or
- The Drivers of Employee Engagement from the Institute for Employment Studies
The Institute for Employment Studies goes onto to advocate that if you don’t get the basics right then any other initiatives are destined to fail.
What basics? These include:
- Good immediate management
- Two-way communication that is listened to, responded to and acted upon
- Effective team work and cooperation
- A focus on developing people and giving them the tools and the skills that they need to do the job that they are being asked to do
- Commitment to employee wellbeing and looking after the person not just performance; and
- Clear, understood and agreed policies, practices and ways of working that are accepted and committed to by all eliminating the one rule for us and another for them syndrome.
There is a lot of ‘science’ in that list of basics but there is a lot more ‘art’ than we would normally acknowledge.
From Wikipedia’s definition of Employee Engagement:
“An “engaged employee” is one who is fully involved in, and enthusiastic about their work, and thus will act in a way that furthers their organisation’s interests.
According to Scarlett Surveys:
“Employee Engagement is a measurable degree of an employee’s positive or negative emotional attachment to their job, colleagues and organisation which profoundly influences their willingness to learn and perform at work”.
Thus, engagement is distinctively different from employee satisfaction, motivation and organisational culture.”
Much of employee engagement is about relationships. The relationship an employee has with their job, their colleagues, their customers and their organisation. And, relationships are all art and very little science.
So, let’s not sweep the art under the carpet and start getting better at it.
What do you think?
Just before Christmas I saw an article on the Econsultancy blog: Loyalty schemes don’t create loyal consumers, says Ipsos MORI. The post was based on research conducted by The Logic Group and Ipsos MORI and suggested that:
- Customer loyalty schemes don’t necessarily drive loyalty;
- That customers want something ‘special’ in exchange for their loyalty, where 71% said that that would entail better offers or services and 48% said that would mean better customer service than other customers.
- But, customers also said that they like ‘free stuff’ and rewards but if presented with a good enough and better offer then they will buy from another business or brand.
So, it seems that most loyalty schemes are reward programmes that don’t necessarily drive loyalty.
So, what does loyalty mean?
In the dictionary, loyalty is:
- the state or quality of being loyal; faithfulness to commitments or obligations.
- faithful adherence to a sovereign, government, leader, cause, etc.
- an example or instance of faithfulness, adherence, or the like: a man with fierce loyalties.
Whereas, Seth Godin in his post Loyalty suggests that:
“Loyal customers understand that there’s almost always something better out there, but they’re not so interested in looking.”
No mention of incentives in either of these.
Let’s not kid ourselves. A reward or ‘bribe’ by another description can and only will last for as long as it is not bettered by another. Just look at the picture above. How many ‘loyalty’ cards do you have in your wallet? Just because you have one in your wallet does that make you loyal? Probably not. I bet it’s got more to do with convenience.
Therefore, if you want to breed real loyalty then give your customers something that is ‘special’ to them as individuals like a better range of services or offers or just better and more personalised service.
Adrian Swinscoe can help you build better relations with your people and your customers that will grow your businesss. To find out more, simply click here.
This is a guest post from Brian Carroll, CEO at Arantech that illustrates what the mobile telecoms companies could be doing to help improve customer retention and a mobile customers experience.
Mobile operators have to cater for a wide range of customers’ needs; everything from high-end users requiring access large amounts of data, to casual users wanting intermittent access to voice and data services. However, one thing that each and every subscriber has in common is that they expect a good level of service from their provider.
Operators are keenly aware of the need to begin shifting their focus away from being network-centric organisations towards becoming more customer-centric. However, the inflexibility of their networks, coupled with the level of subscriber expectation, makes innovation in customer care and management an onerous task. To put this in perspective let’s look at the issues that two mobile subscribers could routinely face in a regular day and how an operator can pro-actively improve those subscribers’ experiences. Firstly, a high-end business user demanding constant access to email and voice services on the move, who we can call Subscriber A, and Subscriber B; a casual, but data-hungry user.
Subscriber A is on a monthly business tariff comprising of inclusive minutes, unlimited texts and extensive data access. More importantly for Subscriber A, he also receives European call and data allowance when abroad and free access to Wi-Fi access points. He requires constant access to email and ubiquitous coverage during peak working hours when travelling. Subscriber A is disgruntled by frequent dropped calls when abroad and high roaming charges when exceeding his inclusive minutes. Dropped calls can be caused by a faulty device or the subscriber moving out of a good coverage area into an area of reduced signal, all of which an operator has visibility of. Furthermore, he is making more calls while abroad than his inclusive minutes allows causing a severe breakdown in the service provider-customer relationship as he is receiving a poor service and being charged more for it. In comparison, Subscriber B is on a personal tariff receiving a small amount of inclusive minutes, unlimited texts and data allowance. Having a smartphone means she is hungry for data; constantly updating social networks, streaming online content and downloading new applications. By accessing vast amounts of data heavy services while on the move she is comprehensively exceeding their data allowance, leading to bill shock at the end of the month.
Both of these scenarios are easily avoidable. By implementing automated Customer Experience Management (CEM) systems that actively monitor and manage subscriber interactions with their network, operators can source the routes of a Subscriber A and Bs’ negative experiences and improve them. For Subscriber A, CEM systems would allow the operator to see that they are far exceeding their monthly Europe zone minutes each month. The operator could then act on this knowledge by offering additional Europe zone minutes for a set price per month to cover off that extra demand. In Subscriber B’s situation an operator can go one step further and break down the usage spike even further. If she is only using up their data usage allowance by constantly accessing and updating social media profiles, the operator can tailor a Social Media bolt-on for a set fee per month that allows them unlimited access to social media networks. This proactivity cements the customer relationship by showing the willingness to improve the subscribers’ experience.
Furthermore, CEM systems can have a positive effect on an end-users experience in the following ways:
- Any potential issues a subscriber faces ‘found and fixed’ immediately and in real-time before it impinges on their experience
- Root and cause analysis of the issue will mean the subscriber will never have the same problem again
- Proactive customer care assistants that are privy to previous call history when a subscriber calls in
- Targeted marketing campaigns based on their preferences leveraged from business intelligence
- Bespoke tariffs and packages to fit with their usage levels leveraged from their individual customer data
A mobile subscriber is happiest when they have to spend less time interacting with their service provider, particularly about negative issues. CEM systems provide operators with a proactive approach in improving each subscriber’s customer experience, making this a distinct possibility.
By Brian Carroll, CEO at Arantech
