Preparing Employees to Deliver a Great Customer Experience

When you think of the phrase “inside-out” relative to the customer experience, you probably cringe. This is not a phrase that customer experience professionals take lightly.

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“Inside-out” means companies focus on processes that are designed and implemented based on internal thinking and intuition. The customer’s needs and perspectives aren’t considered in this type of thinking. Company leaders make decisions because they think they know what’s best for the business, not for the customer. There’s a conscious decision to make process, policy, people, systems, or other changes that:
1. Don’t improve the customer experience at the same time
2. Are about maximizing shareholder returns, not about benefits for the customer
3. Improve internal efficiencies, but to the detriment of customer interactions
4. Are cost-cutting measures that also negatively affect the customer experience
5. Might be the wrong process, policy, people, or systems to change

On the other hand, “outside-in” means that executives look at the business from the customer’s perspective, and subsequently design processes and make decisions based on what’s best for the customer and what meets the customer’s needs. They make decisions based on what they know is best for customers—because they’ve asked and listened.

So imagine my surprise when CallidusCloud CX started talking about “inside-out CX.” It made me pause for a moment; but when you hear them define it as “how employees impact customer satisfaction and, ultimately, the customer experience,” that makes a whole lot of sense. That does not make me cringe. Employees are critical in the customer experience equation.

Let’s think about this for a minute. What exactly does that mean?

It can really only mean one thing: you better make sure that your employees are prepared to impact customer satisfaction, to deliver a great experience!

But employees need the right tools and the right information to do that.

Like what?

First and foremost, they need to know what it means to your organization to “deliver a great experience.” Without that information, they will always fall short. How do we ensure that employees are informed and ready? How do we ensure that they know what’s expected of them? How can we be sure they know the difference between right and wrong actions, behaviors, and more?

Let’s take a look at some of the tools that will address those questions.

Core values: Your core values are guiding principles for your employees; they outline which behaviors and actions are right and which are wrong. Everything they do must be aligned with your values, and those values should be integrated into everything employees do. If employees ever question what they should do or question if what they’re planning to do is aligned with the organization’s expectations, they can refer back to these values.

Brand promise: Make sure you’ve clearly communicated your brand promise to employees. If they don’t know it, how can they live it? How can they deliver it? The smart CEO uses the brand promise to align all of the activities of the organization; that promise guides people, processes, products, and systems. Everything the organization does must support and reinforce the brand promise: every product, every person, every interaction, every touchpoint, all of it. Every time. This is probably one of the key tools for your employees when it comes to delivering a great customer experience.

CX vision: Your customer experience vision is an inspirational and aspirational statement that outlines what you see as the future state of the customer experience. It briefly describes the experience you plan to deliver, and it serves as a guide to help choose future courses of action. It should align with your corporate vision. The hope is that this vision fuels innovation and reminds employees that there’s a human being on the other end of your CX strategy and transformation.

Corporate vision: Your corporate vision not only outlines what the company is trying to achieve, but also guides decision-making processes and the resulting course of action. It not only spells out what you’re doing and for whom you’re doing it, but also creates alignment within the organization. Your corporate vision and CX vision ought to be closely connected, if not one and the same.

Customer understanding: Employees need to be well-informed and well-versed on who your customers are and how employees impact each customer and her experience. Provide persona definitions, journey maps, and customer feedback. The more employees understand customers and the current experience—alongside the desired experience—the better they are able to adjust course and deliver the experience that is expected of them.

Training and communication: I’ll lump these two together because they go hand in hand but individually are of equal importance. Training and communication begin at the point of hire, with a solid onboarding program and communication around the importance of customers and the customer experience to the organization. If you don’t have an onboarding program, it’s time to develop one. Then, throughout the employee’s employment, provide regular training opportunities (especially as customer feedback, customers, and the experience evolve), communicate and set clear expectations, and provide ongoing feedback and coaching about how well the employee is delivering on those expectations.

Not sure where to begin? It might be a good idea to start with an employee CX assessment to identify what employees know and don’t know about your customers and the customer experience. This assessment is time well spent by the entire organization, not just frontline staff. You’ll use the results to better frame training efforts and provide the right tools needed to ensure employees have a clear line of sight to customers, and are equipped to deliver the experience you need (and customers want) them to deliver.

“If you’re not serving the customer, your job is to be serving someone who is.”
—Jan Carlzon

First published on the CallidusCloudCX blog.

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