MarketTools Blog

Last week I was fortunate to attend the 5th Annual Customer Experience Management and Retention Conference in San Francisco, where MarketTools was a platinum sponsor. It was an excellent opportunity to hear about what matters most in the customer satisfaction, retention and loyalty space, directly from executives from Fortune 500 companies.  With attendees from around the globe representing nearly every major industry, we covered topics ranging from social media’s impact on customer feedback to the relevance of NPS.

What conference attendees didn’t see: there really is a Golden Gate Bridge behind all that fog.

What surprised me most was that despite the diversity of topics and situations, nearly every presentation touched on a basic premise outlined in the often-quoted service-profit chain: employee satisfaction is CRITICAL to customer satisfaction. I’ve heard this mentioned in many presentations and often glossed over, almost as an afterthought. Not at this event. Clearly companies have gotten the message loud and clear, and the leaders are addressing this challenge head-on with programs designed to be implemented from the ground up to improve employee satisfaction- and more importantly, employee engagement- across the enterprise.

Here are some of the ways these leading organizations are working to engage employees for improved customer satisfaction:

Role Playing/Empathy:  One of the speakers spoke about the challenge of training technical field service technicians on empathy. These people were trained to fix machines, not support humans. As their job increasingly involves direct customer support, they need to improve their listening skills to provide the proper level of care. She uses role-playing exercises in the field that require on-your-feet thinking, deep listening and focused engagement, which help the technicians build skills they can take into the field and use to provide better customer service.

Language: One of the executives I spoke with pays special attention to the words employees use and carefully guides their internal conversations to instill the right level of empathy for customers. For example, contact center employees at his company had originally been trained to “deal with tickets” rather than “deal with customers.” He’s asked them to replace the word “ticket” with “customer” from now on, and to catch themselves when they complain about “dealing with tickets.” He makes a point of reminding them that it’s a wonderful thing to have customers to deal with, and it’s a lot more fun to have the purpose of your job “supporting customers” as opposed to “closing tickets.”

Small and Frequent Rewards: Several of the presentations spoke to the idea of motivating and rewarding employees in small ways on a regular basis, instead of in large ways once a year. For example, rather than spending large sums of money on an annual holiday party, one executive hosted monthly, inexpensive barbecues at every regional office to give people an opportunity to relax together and celebrate their successes. Another spoke of the idea of creating a sense of community in offshore call centers through office poster-design contests. Others spoke of simply acknowledging top performance in an all-company email on a weekly or monthly basis-- something that costs nothing but provides acknowledgment and motivation.

Keep in mind this perspective did not come from HR department representatives, but from people responsible for Operations, Customer Support, Marketing and Sales. So it appears that the side benefit of working for a company committed to customer satisfaction is that you get to work for a company committed to your satisfaction. I’d love to hear some comments on how you’ve seen this work (or fail) in organizations you’ve worked for.  It should make for an interesting discussion!