Is the level of experience your customers receive is dependent on which employee they encounter? Are there certain employees on your team you hope your best clients interact with? If so, then you have what is known as employee roulette. Employee roulette is a problem most organizations have. There is good news:
You can significantly improve your customer experience with your existing group of employees.
6 Ways To Create Customer Experience Consistency Throughout Your Organization
1. Tie The Employees’ Job To The Overall Purpose
If I asked 25 different employees what your Customer Service Vision Statement (CSVS), how many different answers would I get? Two is too many. You need to create a crystal-clear north star that every team member can articulate in their sleep. A great exercise in helping develop your CSVS is to ask your team members the following two questions:
- After encountering you, how do you want your customers to feel emotionally every time no excuses?
- How do you want customers to describe their interaction with you?
2. Remove Personal Interpretation
If you tell 50 employees to deliver genuine hospitality, you will get 50 interpretations based on their life and past work experiences. You need to remove personal interpretations in all aspects of your customer experience deliverables. For instance, clearly define what you mean.
- Genuine Hospitality = The Five E’s – Eye contact, Enthusiastic greeting, Ear-to-ear smile, Engage, & Educate
- Service Recovery = LEAST – Listen, Empathize, Apologize, Solve, and Thank
- Make a connection = FORD – Family, Occupation, Recreation, & Dreams
3. Create Signature Experience
A signature experience is a distinct CX your customers can only get consistently from you. It has to be realistically achievable, manageable, and affordable to be consistently delivered. In order to create signature experience you need Non-Negotiable standards at every stage of your customer journey to ensure every team member is delivering your signature experience every time, no excuses.
You also need to create a never & always list that ensures anyone who represents your brand, knows there are certain actions you never do or always due when those situations occur.
4. Train & Re-Train
Everything launched to existing employees, also needs to be put into new employee orientation. Employees need to be trained repeatedly on what your signature experience is and why it is so critical that it is delivered consistently. Every story has a villain and a hero. The villain is what’s wrong with the way it is currently being done. The villain may be the competition, the status quo, price cutters, or the pain the customers are experiencing.
The hero is easy; the hero is our initiative and how it will change the company, the industry, our customers’ lives, and solve their problem. You have to be able to sell the purpose of your initiative to all your employees and get them to rally around it–rise up to defeat the villain. You also have to make sure 100% of your employees partake in the launch, either at the live presentation or watching it online within a certain time frame.
5. Certify
Just because your employees were in attendance, or watched the presentation online, doesn’t mean they retained anything. There has to be a certification component. It is important to test each employee to make sure they learned and retained the information that was taught/launched. There are many ways you can do this. One of my favorites is gamifying it, making it a competition between teams, departments or locations. This makes it fun and a team-building activity.
6. Audit & Measure The Execution
Just like the project leader needs to lose sleep at night over the success, now every department, manager, and employee needs to know the key metric that measures the success of this initiative, i.e. retention rate, number of referrals, resign rate, closing ratio, conversion rate, customer satisfaction score or NPS. Not only do they need to know what it is, but what it has to be, and they need to see it daily and know exactly what impacts it. Management and employees need to obsess over this metric. The ones hitting the goal need to be celebrated loudly, the ones who are underperforming need to be coached and convinced that this is the way we are operating now and forever. Live it, love it or leave it.
- Measure who is doing it consistently and recognizing and coaching until it is 100% consistently being executed.
- Measure that it has an impact on the customer. Do they recognize the value and is it affecting satisfaction levels and impacting the key metrics, i.e. average tickets, conversation rates, retention, referrals, resigns, Net Promoter Score.
