This is a true story that struck at the central role employees play in delivering a superior customer experience and the organizational challenge it poses for management. “I will care about what you say when I believe you care about me,” a manager recalled one frontline worker saying to him. All leaders should understand that a company can provide a great experience only through frontline workers.
The main hurdle in customer experience is translating boardroom vision into action at the front line. Empowered employees are the key. The secret to delighting customers: Putting employees first.
Once upon a time, a little girl visited a Disney theme park. Sadly, while there, she dropped her favorite doll over a fence and into a mud puddle. When members of the park staff retrieved the doll, it was a mess. So, they made it a new outfit, gave it a bath and a new hairdo, and even took photos of it with other Disney dolls before reuniting it with the owner that evening. “Pure magic” was the way the girl’s mother described the doll’s return.
What may be most remarkable about this fairy-tale ending, which has since become part of Disney’s institutional lore, is what didn’t occur. The theme-park team didn’t panic, consult a corporate script on what to do in such a situation, or anxiously seek advice from managers so as not to botch their response to a small—but real—crisis for one of its customers. That’s because, at least in this case, the team’s understanding of what needed to be done for the young customer grew automatically from a systemic cultural emphasis that Disney puts on frontline customer service.
Such devotion pays dividends. Emotionally engaged customers are typically three times more likely to recommend a product and to purchase it again. With an eye to these benefits, many companies are making customer experience a strategic priority. Unfortunately, they typically struggle to gain traction with their efforts.
Improving customer experience is difficult to get right, because the primary hurdle is translating boardroom vision for a superior customer experience into action at the front line.
The competitive edge is about seeing the world through the customer’s eyes. To maximize customer satisfaction, companies have long emphasized touchpoints. But doing so can divert attention from the more important issue: the customer’s end-to-end journey.
Technological advances have made it much easier for companies to understand customers on an individual basis. Even so, engaging with customers is still undertaken largely through personal contact. And there’s no shortcut to creating emotional connections with customers; it requires ensuring that every interaction is geared toward leaving them with a positive experience. That takes more than great products and services, it takes motivated, empowered frontline employees. Creating great customer experiences requires having an engaged and energized workforce, one that can translate individual experiences into satisfying end-to-end customer journeys and can continue to improve the journeys to maintain a competitive edge. By appropriately motivating and rewarding such employees, a company will demonstrate its commitment to the employees’ work and will thus align their interests more closely with its own customer strategy goals.
Leading companies listen to their employees and seek to tackle their problems and needs. They hire with attitude, not aptitude, in mind and work to build on attitudinal strengths as part of employee development. They build motivation by instilling shared purpose in frontline workers rather than by applying behavioral rules. Finally, they tap into the creativity of frontline workers by assigning autonomy and responsibility to stimulate innovative thinking.
Transforming the customer experience requires a methodical approach to understanding and engaging employees.
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