Customer experience (CX) is all about people getting what they need in their lives. People in your company are central to designing and delivering great customer experiences. So Human Resources (HR) departments can make a big difference in helping companies achieve CX goals, as we discussed in Part 1 of this article:
— Seeing HR’s work within the bigger picture of external customers’ needs.
— Helping executives establish a customer-focused big picture in strategy and culture.
— Injecting a CX backdrop in the way HR facilitates hiring.
— Developing and recognizing employees.
Part 2 of this article revisits a #CXO chat on twitter where ideas were discussed on how HR can expand value to the company’s CX goals by facilitating knowledge management, employee engagement, and cross-functional collaboration.
Data insights can help maximize ROI of the work done by HR and employees collectively.
Knowledge Management
Knowledge management is most glaringly missing in competencies of supervisors at every managerial level.
Supervisor skills are 70% of employee engagement success. And disengaged employees drop balls in the value chain across your firm leading to what your customers experience. (State of the Global Workforce: 2023 Report, Gallup.)
Partnering with the CX Leader is the first step for Human Resources to set up Employee Experience properly. Why?
Modern versus outdated drivers of employee experience and engagement are:
— My Purpose vs. My Paycheck.
— My Development vs. My Satisfaction.
— My Coach vs. My Boss.
(The Strengths, Weaknesses and Blind Spots of Managers, Gallup, May 28, 2024.)
What is every employee’s purpose? All roles are collaborating to be the preferred choice in meeting or exceeding your customers’ expectations. Everyone and everything is funded by customers (yes, including investors). This is where you use customer experience insights to shape employees’ enthusiasm for teamwork and strong performance.
Knowledge management is important to CX because:
(1) Customers don’t want to repeat themselves and they expect consistency in their dealings with the company over time and across locations and among departments: customers see a company as a single unit.
(2) Efficiency and effectiveness of knowledge across the company can significantly save time, energy, and costs, and improve morale, productivity, and return on assets.
Here are ways HR can help:
— HR can be a catalyst to knowledge sharing, but it requires a cross-organizational culture and alignment to succeed. —@tcrawford
— Use group sharing engines to share documents with strategies and knowledge across departments. —@EngageGXD
— Propagate thought leadership: blog/wikis/social media are a great way to tap into peers’ expertise. —@sharmasights
— An enterprise social platform can integrate collaborative networking & knowledge management. —@RickClements01
— Highlight CX “employees of the month” and record video podcasts where they share their guidance with peers. —@jameskobielus
— Hiring: Data can help determine common characteristics that define the “right fit”. —@AlexConde
— Development: HR can use big data to identify training/development needs and content for CX-focused business and behaviors. —@clearaction
— Development: Customer experience negatively impacted by disgruntled employees. CX & HR must identify link, mitigate risk. Look for trends showing sour-channel-employee impacts on CX. Remove from channel before too late. On positive side, do analytics to identify trend impact of loyal/happy channel employees on CX. —@jameskobielus
— Recognition: Big data might be used by HR to better design/understand impact of CX bonus criteria. —@clearaction
Engagement
Cost of employee disengagement is a leading cause of inflation, which erodes trust externally (customer churn, negative word-of-mouth, prospects’ doubts raising cost of customer acquision and employee acquisition) and internally:
— 23% of employees are engaged.
— 59% are quiet quitting.
— 18% are loud quitting.
Disengaged employees are costing companies $8.8 Trillion worldwide. In 2024, 50% to 77% of employees are disengaged!
Employee engagement is vital to CX because:
(1) Technology, surveys, and intelligence are only as valuable as the actions that they inspire and enable.
(2) Customer experience is shaped by the ripple effect of each department across the company.
Many companies are striving to maximize employee engagement for financial reasons, or to be viewed as a great place to work, making it easier to attract and retain top talent.
Shift-up from this self-serving mindset to customer-centric thinking and employee-centric thinking.
Nimbly resilient organizations increase likelihood of:20
Greater revenue by 158%.
Innovation in the face of obstacles by 737%.
Employees’ strong desire to stay for at least 1 year by 634%.
Thriving workplace culture by 914%.
(2024 Global Culture Report, O.C. Tanner Institute.)
When employees see their organization as nimbly resilient, likelihood increases for:20
Above-average engagement by 699%.
Feeling a strong connection to the organization by 568%.
Being a Promoter by 460%.
Keys to employees and leaders seeing themselves as nimbly resilient:
Employees are well-informed about challenges facing their organization +146%.
Teams regularly collaborate on projects with other teams +174%.
Employees comfortably adapt to changes in their job role +181%.
Keys to them seeing their organization as nimbly resilient:
Employees regularly see information about changes facing their organization +125%.
Organization empowers employees to challenge accepted ways of doing things +165%.
Organization encourages regular collaboration across departments and teams +192%.
Here are ways HR can help:
— The more successful engaged companies understand that the CX starts with EVERY employee trained and engaged. —@iamLivingston
— High employee engagement = ownership and pride. Create CX playbooks & best practice to guide interactions with customers. —@Lynn_Teo
— CX is often a reflection of employee experience. HR should help promote a happy, healthy, and prosperous work environment. —@Lynn_Teo
— HR must integrate with the Ops teams. Communicate the challenges, talk to the floor, know the pulse. Listen, observe, and advise. —@iamLivingston
— Focus employee metrics more on CX enabling behaviors, less on survey ratings. —@clearaction
— If employees are empowered and engaged, just get the organization out of their way. —@thecxguy
— Employee engagement is improved when they get regular personalized customer feedback on their ability to satisfy (or otherwise). —@jameskobielus
— Good idea to empower all employees to participate in social media with customers: EMC, Intel, Adobe, IBM do. —@clearaction
If you agree that your company would not exist without customers, then exponential value may be achieved when CX is the context for every type of employee engagement — not just among customer-facing employees for specific CX endeavors.
Collaboration
Dropping the ball cross-organizationally is causing poor experience for fellow employees and poor customer experience. ($3.7 Trillion of 2024 Global Sales are at Risk Due to Bad Customer Experiences, Qualtrics XM Institute, February 1, 2024.)
Cross-functional collaboration is essential to CX because:
(1) Customers see a company as “one”.
(2) Aligning the company to customers is more likely to succeed than insisting the customers align to the company.
(3) Customer pain is often the result of weak handoffs and communication gaps between functional areas.
(4) Silos are a source of wasted costs, time, energy, and goodwill — usually for the company and customers alike.
Here are ways HR can help:
— We assume teams know how to collaborate across departments. Frameworks and guidelines for interaction help. —@Lynn_Teo
— Anyone can work together if they understand how intricately interdependent they are. —@mhsutton
— Collaboration can only happen if supported by a strong open culture & tools that can be integrated into the workflow of all. —@iSocial_Fanz
— By identifying partnerships between key department leads & formalizing key interactions. HR has a unique vantage point across the organization. —@Lynn_Teo
— Combine cross-functional teams into broader scheme of things and set CX objective. —@sharmasights
— Omit the notion of “customer-facing.” Service standards are needed for *all* employees, regardless of title or level. —@stephaniethum
— CX and HR can collaborate better if they have meetings together first of all, and if their department heads talk regularly. —@EngageGXD
Re-think each role’s purpose in keeping their eye on the ball at all times: the ball is your customers’ expectations. Your Marketing and Sales teams set those expectations. Lowest costs and highest gains center on meeting those expectations right the first time.
Customer experience is broadly affected by the entire company: its culture, internal handoffs, attitudes, decisions, processes, policies, and actions. Knowledge management, employee engagement, and cross-functional collaboration can be facilitated by HR to achieve greater connectedness, consistency and synergy both internally and externally. CX excellence is about people (suppliers) giving their best to people (customers) who are willing to reward that with their wallets and enthusiasm.
In Part 1 of this article, Why Customer Experience Excellence Requires HR Engagement, see how HR can modify their core stewardship to promote greater customer-focus.
