Employees are Key to a Superior Customer Experience

Back when AT&T was the monopolistic entity providing telephone service, Lily Tomlin played a recurring role as “Ernestine,” a telephone operator. After treating a caller rudely and hanging up, she would grin sourly, snort and say, “We’re the phone company. We don't care. We don't have to."

      As they always say about comedy, it works best when there’s a grain of truth to it. And in those days, AT&T was The Phone Company – a.k.a., “Ma Bell” – and had virtually no competition.
      To those of us on the receiving end, it often felt like AT&T could and did operate any way it wished without fear of losing customers. Ernestine’s sneering uncaring attitude was emblematic of how people perceived Ma Bell.
      How far we’ve come in our choices. The end of the AT&T monopoly, and the advent and rapid growth of mobile telephony have marginalized conventional telephones. But more than just the landscape of the phone business has changed since the day of Ernestine. The drivers and predictors of business success also have changed.
      In a brilliant and insightful book titled Outside In, Harley Manning and Kerry Bodine of Forrester Research make the case that today, the chief avenue to business success is the customer experience, i.e., “How your customers perceive their interactions with your company.”
      Even monopolies like the old Ma Bell couldn’t get away with abusing customers and expect to stay in business today. All businesses must excel at the customer experience or risk the onset of a death spiral that will end in their demise.
      Assuring that people become loyal customers involves making it easy to find, buy and use your products/services. This is a complex exercise encompassing all components of and people within your organization.
      At its heart, the authors explain, the customer experience is what happens when your customers try to:

• Learn about your product/service offerings
• Evaluate them
• Buy them
• Use them
• And, if necessary, get help when they have a problem with them.

In the end, it’s about how customers feel about those many different encounters. Are they happy, excited and reassured, or disappointed and frustrated?
      Outside In first defines the customer experience and describes its value before delving into the disciplines of superior customer experience, and the paths that companies can take to assure that the customer experience becomes central to their business. 

Engaging employees in the mission 

Though the book touches on the subject throughout, from my perspective, the ability of a company to engage its employees in the company’s larger mission will shape its ongoing ability to deliver a superior experience for customers time and time again – thus assuring their continued loyalty and positive word-of-mouth. In other words, every employee must be engaged in delivering that superior experience.
      It’s not just the customer-facing people – those in the retail stores or the people who provide support and sales on the 800-number. It involves everyone. Even if you banished Ernestine and her kind from your company, that would not be enough to assure a superior experience for all customers.
      The CEO of a client company spoke at the quarterly town meeting for the employees last fall about the unacceptable level of customer defections they were experiencing. She said, “These are things that we can control. This isn’t just about customer service. This isn’t just about retail stores. This is everybody in the business understanding how each one of us impact this.” And she’s right.
      We once helped a financial services company as it made a radical change in the way it went to market. Instead of focusing on the financial products it created and sold as it always had, it shifted its focus to its largest customer segment – small business owners – and their unique needs. The change was obvious and a relatively easy shift for the customer-facing employees. Not so everyone else.
      The employees that developed, marketed and supported the new products and services had a tougher shift. So our communications strategy sought to engage the entire organization in the monumental change by helping them better sense the world in which customers bought and used its offerings.
      The resulting program required managers to engage their teams in detailed exercises – using actual video interviews with small business owners – to be better able to think like them and fully appreciate the challenges they faced. The goal of the program was to help them make the connection between the products the company provided and how they could help customers surmount their challenges.
      We knew the program was a success when we heard that the IT department – about as far removed from customer interactions as any department – figured out how they could contribute to improving the total customer experience. It made quite a difference.
      No one else in the organization outside of IT would ever have identified that opportunity for improvement. No one else would have imagined that an internally focused operation could have such an impact on the customer experience.
      The point is, the entire organization must think like a customer and appreciate the challenges and needs of customers. That way, they will do their job most effectively toward the company’s larger mission of delivering a superior customer experience.