Employee Engagement is Foundational to Customer-Centric Success

Establishing Customer Experience as a foundational part of your brand’s company culture means nothing without your employees actually turning these directions into real-life interactions with customers. Employee engagement needs to be a foundational aspect of your customer-centric practices to create the kind of Customer Experience that leads to more brand ambassadors and a higher customer retention rates. But what are some ways that your brand can engage with and encourage its employees to make the effort to provide this experience?

Firstly, this process starts from the initial day of hiring a new employee. It is easy to tell if the person you are hiring has a knack for connecting with people, because they should have been able to display this talent in the interview process. It is essential that all employees, especially those interacting directly with the customer on the sales floor, have clear instructions and directions about why, what and how they should be interacting with customers. Seek out enthusiastic, charismatic, and extroverted candidates, because those are the kinds of people that will be able to truly impact customer touchpoints, and provide more value for the customer when necessary.

The next step in securing employee engagement is making sure that all employees on that interact with customers are equipped with enough information to answer basic questions across all genres of your brand. In some unique cases sending a customer to another representative may be the answer, but most of the time this practice will diminish your brand’s reputation in the eye of that customer. Each employee should have the proper amount of training to be able to deal with customer queries, without wasting the customer’s time by sending them down the line until they find the right employee. Implementing this concept of employee engagement for customer-centric success is built around the company culture established by the upper-management. It starts at the top, so if you are not treating your employees with respect or providing them with the tools and environment for success, you are liable to suffer through high employee-turnover rates, and therefore longer employee-training periods. Thus, it will be extremely difficult to meet the customer experience standards that are involved in becoming an industry leader.

However, it can be challenging to measure whether your employees are behaving according to the guidelines that are sent down from the upper-brass. That is why when creating these customer-centric campaigns, utilizing programs like mystery shopping or voice of customer surveys are essential. These programs will give you unfiltered opinions about the way your employees conduct themselves, directly from the voice of the customer. Being able to hear what your customer is thinking is invaluable to creating this culture within your brand, and employing mystery shopping and customer feedback surveys are some of the most effective ways to retrieve this information. If given the opportunity, your customers will willingly become integral members of this employee engagement process. Use your customer’s voices and opinions to form the customer experience practices that best fit your brand, and you will have the potential to provide unmatched value to your customer.

Second To None empowers customer-centric brands to deliver consistent, intentional and authentic consumer experiences.

We adeptly design and manage mystery shopping, compliance, engagement and voice of customer solutions grounded in strategic relevance, program integrity and actionable insights. Our solutions are developed on the basis of solid research and statistical science. We achieve success through a relentless focus on quality and innovation, consultative relationships and a talented team of professional associates.