How to Engage Employees to Create a Customer-Focused Culture — and Why it Matters
There’s no denying the research: Delivering a great customer experience (CX) is good for business. According to Forrester Research, a company’s relationship with its customers is the number one factor that determines whether or not it will survive—not its products, its solutions, or pricing. And it pays off: companies who are considered customer experience leaders have been consistently found to grow revenue faster, outperform the market, and boast greater employee satisfaction.
More often than not, CX is an initiative owned by customer-facing employees. But to get CX right, every employee in the company must play a role. And it starts with developing a customer-focused culture – where all employees feel accountable for the customer experience.
So how do you create a customer-focused culture?
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How to Inspire, Engage, and Equip Your Employees to Care About Your Customers: 10 Things to Build Into Your CX Training
From our research and work with Fortune 500 clients, we’ve learned that this takes time, effort, planning, and commitment from leaders and employees. Above all else, make it a priority, ground it in your business strategy, and don’t forget to have some fun.
To support the shift to a customer-focused culture, we developed a few key strategies:
- Create a “customer line of sight” — help each individual employee and team “see” how their day to day work connects to the customer experience whether they’re in IT, HR, finance, or another business function with limited customer interaction
- Boost holistic thinking — encourage collaboration to improve cross-functional communication and teamwork with the goal of enhancing the customer experience by creating “agile” tools, practices, and organizational structure and design
- Move employees from motivated to empowered — establish opportunities for peer-to-peer influence and help managers and leaders understand what they are doing to enable (or inhibit) employees to deliver a great customer experience
- Disrupt old mindsets — provoke new thinking, new insights, new commitment, and new behaviors to keep the customer experience top of mind
To better understand how these ideas translate into real behavior change in your organization, check out our client story Engaging Employees To Create A Customer Centric-Culture.