Exceptional customer experiences must be first understood in terms of the desired results of a customer/employee interaction (how customers feel as a result of the experience). The following are three outcomes each customer service experience should enhance:

Action steps to ensure your customer service experiences are exceptional:

1. Gather data: Find out from your customers to what degree that they experience these outcomes as a result of their experience with your employees. Find out what your employees do (and don’t do) that interferes with your customer’s intent to repeat and recommend.
2. Define high priority expectations: Use this data to better define what YOUR employees need to do at your customer/employee moments of truth. Data is essential because every organization is different and what value you are promising is not the same as even your competitors. For example, what drives intent to repeat and recommend differs between Target and Wal-mart customers, even though they are in the same industry. Find out what matters most to your customers.
3. Translate high priority expectations into clear employee performance expectations. Use the outcomes to drive decisions on how your employees need to behave. Create meaningful performance objectives tied into related measures that your leaders can use to help guide and coach your employees.

I have a long-held belief that brand strength directly correlates with customer satisfaction. A customer has to be consistently satisfied in order to move along the continuum towards becoming a brand lover (one that uses your products/services time and time again) to brand loyalists (exclusively uses only your brand) to ultimately a brand evangelist (actively recommends you to others.) See visual below.

What I appreciate about the book “The Ultimate Question 2.0 (Revised and Expanded Edition): How Net Promoter Companies Thrive in a Customer-Driven World” is that is provides the following:

• Clear data that not only proves my belief that satisfaction leads to brand evangelism but also the connection between brand evangelism (my words) to sustainable profits.
• Distinction between good profits and bad (bad profits are the earnings that do not endure vs. good profits earned by the creation of value).
• The reality is that there are no short cuts to good profits. No silver bullets.
• The ultimate question that all customers should be asked: “how likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague?”
• An approach for measuring success against this question and what actions to take that include getting your organization and employees aligned.

I believe that the principles that relate to customer service can be applied to improving employee engagement. For example, if you want to create employees who invest their discretionary effort with you (like we want our customers to invest their discretionary income with us), then you need to focus on trust. You can measure trust in that same simple question: “how likely is it that you would recommend working for this company to a friend or colleague.”

Trust is one of those often agreed principles that can be more theoretical and abstract to understand, measure and improve. This book provides an excellent means for quantifying what may on the surface appear to be unquantifiable. It takes out the mystery and replaces it with clear actions.

For more information on this book, check out: http://www.netpromotersystem.com/book/index.aspx

A brand is a promise that a company makes and consistently delivers to its customers. However, an organization doesn’t fulfill those promises. The employees of the organization do. It is for this reason that your strategic brand conversations must be collaborative because your marketing department makes the promises that the people in your operations (supported by human resource practices) deliver on.

Therefore, the business case for collaborative branding must begin with an understanding of the correlation between how engaged your employees are, their performance and your ability to fulfill your brand promises and ultimately your sustainable brand worth. Employee engagement relates to what extent your employees are emotionally and rationally committed to your organization. The outputs of engagement are: intent to stay and investment of discretionary effort. More engaged employees will go above and beyond for your customers time and time again.

The business case is summarized in the chart below.

• According to a 2005 study from the Corporate Leadership Council on engagement, there is a “The 10:6:2” Rule which means:
  • Every 10% improvement increases in commitment can increase an employee’s effort by 6%
  • Every 6% improvement in effort can increase an employee’s performance by 2%
• Customer “wins” is when your organization is able to strongly deliver on what is absolutely the most important to your customer (that he or she may or not have been aware of.) A “win” is what your do to far exceed your customer’s expectations. The research team at Walt Disney World was able to quantify the linkage between increasing the number of wins to customer satisfaction and ultimately to revenue.

This business case provides the burning platform for your marketing, operations, finance and human resource executives to work together on your annual strategic brand planning.

The truth is that there is a strong business case for engaging your employees in your mission and brand and it can be quantified. You may or may not have the expertise in house, you may or may not have the solid employee or customer data readily at hand. However, taking the time to create this business case will demonstrate for you and for the rest of your organization that your brand investment is one like any other investment and you should expect a return on it. However, to truly realize the return, you have to look broader than the simple metrics of customer acquisition (# of new prospects, etc.) because if you do, you are leaving money on the table. Increasing the number of new customers and revenue streams is important. But what if you could get those new customers and revenue streams while minimizing your marketing dollars? It is for this reason, you want to establish your business case. When your employees live your brand, your return on your brand investment will be exponentially higher because:

• Your perceived integrity will be higher
• The speed of your brand equity growth will be accelerated
• You will be able get these results by maximizing your existing assets (less marketing dollars, maximizing the return on your human capital investment)

Three Key Actions

1. Collect baseline data on your current levels of employee engagement (the extent your employees are rationally and emotionally committed to your organization) and customer satisfaction.
2. Identify the drivers of employee engagement and what constitutes a win in the minds of your customers
3. Find measurement experts who can help you connect the dots between these data points and your revenue achievement and brand worth.