Customer-Facing Employees and CX Buy-In

Experience Action. Let's stop just talking about customer experience, employee experience and the experience of leaders. Let's turn ideas into action. Your host, Jeannie Walters, is an award-winning customer experience expert, international keynote speaker and founder of Experience Investigators, a strategic consulting firm helping companies increase sales and customer retention through elevated customer experiences. Ready, Set, Action.

Hi, everyone! I am Jeannie Walters. You have questions about customer experience and I hope I have answers. Welcome to the Experience Action Podcast.

Hi, it's Jenny from the Experience Investigators team. We had a great question come in during our webinar about the 10 Critical Components of Successful Customer Experience Programs And How To Prove Value. We didn't have time to get to the question, Jeannie, so how about we answer it on the Experience Action Podcast? Here's the question: I have C-suite buy-in for CX. How can we improve customer buy-in with our customer-facing employees?

This is a fantastic question and first of all, let me just say I'm so happy to hear that you have leadership buy-in. That is really the number one thing that drives success for customer experience leaders and teams. So congratulations on that. You're doing a lot right. What I would say is that when we're talking about customer facing teams, sometimes we maybe don't practice all that we preach about including people and making sure they have a seat at the table. So I'm going to give you a few ideas, but I encourage you to think about ways that you can collaborate and co-create with those customer-facing teams.

Now, the number one thing that I would recommend is make sure that you are communicating the why. If your customer-facing teams are not familiar with your customer experience mission, with really understanding the goals of your organization, then we're asking them to be transactional instead of really understanding how they fit into that bigger picture. So make sure that they understand that it's not just important to deliver customer experience on behalf of customers or even our organization, but it's really for employees. It's really for them as well. They have to understand not just how their role impacts the customer and the overall success of the business, but also how we appreciate their insights, their feedback, all of that two-way communication that is so important to help them feel invested in the why of the organization and customer experience. [ding] Of course, we want to think about training and professional development and overall education. Now, we sometimes treat training like it's a one-and-done. You know, we bring somebody in and we say, here's how you use the cash register and we leave it at that. But really we want to continue to reinforce what customer experience should be in our organization. Now, one of the things that I like to do is talk to them about things like empathy and listening skills and things like problem solving in the moment. What do you do if? Helping them feel empowered and engaged helps them feel less transactional and more part of the bigger solution.

We also want to make sure that they are confident and comfortable in what the behaviors and actions are that we're asking for. This is where what we have a tool called the Service Code can be very, very helpful. This is where we're tying the behaviors and actions that we're looking for with that customer experience mission, helping them realize that when we say things like be friendly, we have a few ideas of what that looks like. Now we're not prescribing them to say certain things. Necessarily, what we're doing is we're giving them the idea of kind of the ethos and the values that we want them to carry forward in their own unique abilities and behaviors. And it is never too early and never too late to start really recognizing and rewarding the frontline employees who are doing such great work.

We want to make sure that the folks who are delivering outstanding customer experiences are recognized publicly so that others see, oh, that's the behavior that gets recognized. I'm going to aim for that. off. Now, of course, formal recognitions are great, but this can be informal too. Sometimes an extra day off. Sometimes things like, you know, a mention in a company wide communication, a photo in a hallway, all of those things can go a long, long way. Now, if we can tie it to bonuses and performance, that's even better. So if you have the ability to do that, that can be a powerful motivator as well for your frontline folks to really understand their role and understand what good looks like, so they know how to deliver on it.

And then getting back to that co-creation idea, how can we collaborate with them? How can we make sure that we are listening to them so that they feel invested and empowered? They know that we're not just asking them to show up, we're asking them to be a part of this organization. They are representing the brand. That is a big deal. Let's let them know it's a big deal and let's let them feel like we are respectful of their ideas, that we know they're interacting directly with the customer.

We want to hear what they're observing and seeing and experiencing so that we can address problems as they come up, so that we can give them real-time support when they need it, and that we can address problems as they come up, so that we can give them real time support when they need it, and that we can really improve processes to make their lives easier in these roles. We don't want them to have to go through 98 pages of a knowledge base to get their question answered. What we wanna do is empower them to say, "'This isn't working. This process that you have, it's not really working for us in the moment, so what can we do about it?" That's where you invite them into that process of improving the experience, not just for customers, but also for all the employees serving them as well. And then, finally, here we need to lead by example. We need to make sure that we are living up to that mission, that we are providing the view for where we're going as an organization and why our customer experience matters so, so much [ding, ding] to not just the organization but individual leaders and ultimately making us feel like we're living up to the promise every day. So if we talk about the fact that they need to be responsive to customers and we ourselves are not responsive to them, that creates that misalignment between what we're saying is important and what our actions are saying is important. So let's make sure that we are constantly looking at if we're really leading by example for what we're asking our customer-facing employees to do. This is a great question.

I'm so pleased to hear that so many of you have been interested in the ideas around successful customer experience programs and leadership. Now this question came in in a webinar we had and I encourage you to check that out. It's the 10 Critical Components of Successful Customer Experience Programs and, for those of you who are looking for more of this information, we are launching CXI Ground School™ yet again. In this program, it's 12 weeks where we guide you through foundational ideas to get your foundation right. Create your customer experience mission, create your customer experience success statement, so that you know where your customer experience is going, that you can be intentional and positive and proactive, so that you can earn meaningful results for your organization. Now, a Service Code is one of the many things that we talk about in this program. I encourage you to check it out and apply today at cxiflightschool. com.

Thank you all so much for being a part of our Experience Action Podcast community. We love hearing from you! Don't forget you can leave me whatever question you want at AskJeannie. V VIP. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. Leave me messages there and they might just be answered on the Experience Action Podcast. Thank you for all you do and everything that you do every day to help me live the mission of creating fewer ruined days for customers. By you being here today, you're helping us live that mission. Thank you so much and I'll see you next time. To learn more about our strategic approach to experience, check out free resources at experienceinvestigators. com, where you can sign up for our newsletter, our Year of CX program and more, and please follow me, Jeannie Walters, on LinkedIn.