Do you treat your employees like customers?

Sometimes a determined focus on Customers & Insight can cause us to take our ‘eye of the ball‘ with regards to colleagues or employees. Well, you may not have made that mistake, but I’ve certainly done so in the past. In the busyness of achieving our insight goals, it was too easy to forget about employee insight or take action to address their concerns.

For that reason, it was good to see Carl Lyon (from The Q of E) using an interview on his experience of judging Customer Experience Magazine awards to raise the importance of focussing on the needs of employees too. Having chatted with Carl personally, I know he sees this as a seamless part of mastering customer experience improvement. Here’s his interview:

That in turn reminded me of how struck I was a few months ago that two of the strongest & most consistent examples in KPMG Nunwood’s US Customer Experience Excellence report also focus on their people. Both Wegmans and Chick-Fil-A have consistently scored highly in this annual test. But reading their case studies will tell you that their main point of differentiation isn’t customer insight or CXM systems, it’s their people. Both businesses place a lot of importance on recruiting people with the right attitude, training them in the culture, listening to them & expecting them to live the culture. Worth a look:

So, how could you be better engaging not just your Customer Insight team but employees across different functions in your business. Listen & Care is a good place to start but here are a few more handy hints (6 in total) from Mark Crowley. He rightly raises the variation still in engagement metrics and immaturity of best practice in employee insight. But it’s also interesting to see that diverse sources still show the main things are a caring boss & being flexible, especially with your employee’s time. Any other points resonate with you?

So, over to you. How are you engaging your teams or gaining insight on their ideas & concerns? Is your business convinced that employee experience will drive customer experience? Do you put your money where your mouth is?