Gaining Frontline 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.

It's the Experience Action Podcast. I'm Jeannie Walters and I want you to make sure that you are well connected to those folks in your organization that are serving your customers. That's why this next question is so good.

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 such a great question because we talk so much about getting that leadership buy-in which is so incredibly important to any customer experience strategy. But if we don't have that buy-in from the customer-facing employees, then that's really hard to translate into buy-in from our customers themselves. So what can we do here? Well, first of all, whoever asked this question, you are already off to a great start. The fact that you have that C-suite buy-in is absolutely part of a winning formula. So you have enough to really start succeeding already. But if we get our entire executive team on board, if we have that cross-functional support of leadership, that support might not be enough to really deliver when we need to for customers. So we have this idea, our customer experience vision, that hopefully we've turned into a Customer Experience Mission Statement. We've socialized that throughout the organization, and then we start realizing that the customer facing employees maybe aren't as aligned as we hoped. So what can we do about that? Well, a couple of things. We need to first of all, acknowledge and respect and reward and recognize that our customer-facing employees are the face of the brand. They are the ones who are interacting directly with customers, whether that's being in a storefront or delivering products, or if they're in the contact center serving the customers who are starting to have some issues or questions. So if we look at all of those employees, if they're not well connected to the idea of the Customer Experience Mission, then they're going to start creating a little bit of mythology.

Now, sometimes I've seen this in the form of contact center agents believing that they were being measured on different things than was reality. For example, there was one organization I worked with where I started asking the agents what do you think is a good way to show up for the customer, based on the customer experience mission statement, and to a one, they all said well, we can't worry about that, because we're judged on the time on call. Now they thought that their success was based on limiting the number of seconds they were on the phone with a customer in need. Here's the irony. I went back to the leadership and I said tell me about this. Where did this come from? Why are we measuring that so, so strictly? And they all said oh, we can't get rid of this. We haven't measured that for a while, but nobody believes us because they were coming out of a culture that was punitive when it came to these metrics. So what that tells us is we need a lot of communication, we need a lot of collaboration and we need to make sure that people understand that they will be rewarded and recognized based on the outcomes that are tied back to that vision that we have for them the customer experience mission and then tying that back to our organizational results with a Customer Experience Success Strategy. If we can get everybody on board, we'll start seeing that, instead of creating mythology around these ideas, they'll start delivering innovations around these ideas.

How can we do this better? How can we get more people involved? How can we get that buy-in? And once we have that, it becomes a little bit of a snowball rolling downhill. There's momentum around this. This is why we talk about celebrating small wins in the beginning. This is why we talk about having things like mission moments in the beginning of your meetings, so that everybody understands this is who we are. This is how we want you to show up and we're going to recognize the people who are doing this really well and turn those best practices into processes throughout the organization. We need to walk the talk. Now, if we do this, if we really connect with those customer facing employees, then we have a better shot at customers believing us. We have a better shot that they will understand that we're investing in this on their behalf.

Now, they might not see these changes right away. There might be cynicism and skeptics out there who think, ah, this is another thing that they're talking about in their marketing, or they're maybe doing a few things differently, but they're still the same company, right? We've heard that, and so, if that's the case, let's invite customers more into the process. Let's make them partners in co-creating these experiences. This is through feedback and closing the loop. And let's get personal. Let's tell them you know, we heard you and this is what we're doing, or this is what's next, or this is what you can expect. Because if I feel heard as a human, I'm going to feel more connected to the brand, I'm going to be more bought in, I'm going to be more emotionally loyal than I would be if I'm not hearing anything from the brand that I'm giving feedback to on a regular basis, especially. So maybe we look for opportunities to, I like to say, turn up the volume on those moments in the journey that can be neglected or overlooked. Are there ways we can make the invoicing process simpler? Are there ways that we can reach out and thank them for their loyalty, recognize the anniversary, recognize their birthdays? Personal moments like that really really matter. So, by getting the customer facing employees bought in, that will translate into better moments around the customer, as long as we're providing ways for them to give us that feedback and input.

Nothing we do in CX is a solo gig. We need to build coalitions throughout the organization. We need to make sure that we are collaborating and co-creating with our customers and we need to make sure that we are not just reporting up but responding back to the people who have given us these ideas, these suggestions, these complaints. We need to embrace that and show up for them. That's what builds trust. That's what actually helps with getting buy-in. It's great to have leadership buy-in we need that to succeed but we need the buy-in of our customer-facing employees and our customers themselves in order to make any of this work. So I really encourage you to come back and look at commitment. What is the commitment we've made? How can we show and not just tell the customer facing employees and the customers we're serving that we are there for them that we are committed to this vision on their behalf and with them as a partner. If we can do that, we can get that buy-in that we so desperately need.

What a great question, and thank you to all of you who have been attending our webinars and LinkedIn Lives, and if you never want to miss an opportunity, then make sure you check out experienceinvestigators. com and sign up for our Weekly Win newsletter. That's where we share all of the great things that are coming up with us and our clients, and we also share just some fun things from me every week, so I encourage you to check that out. I love these questions, I love what you're doing and I can't wait to support you, so be sure you ask me a question at askjeannie. vip. Thanks for listening and I'll see you next week. 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.