Engaged Employees Equals Engaged Customers

Now that we’ve taken a deep dive into employee engagement and the enormous potential available through a commitment to facilitating such engagement, let’s take a look at the benefits this will produce for your customers. According to Gallup's  research, when organisations successfully engage both their customers AND their employees, they experience a 240% boost in performance-related business outcomes. Yes, that is a zero after the 24, not a typo – 240%.

Front-line employees represent a particularly important opportunity to fulfill the mission and purpose of your organisation during their direct interactions with existing and potential customers. Given everything that we've covered about engagement so far, the question then becomes, how do you know the best methodology, or process, to implement within your organisation to make sure that employees are aligned to your brand, and engaged in their work, as well as with your customers?

10 Ways To Improve The Customer Experience

Gallup’s research illustrates that few employees are aligned with or empowered to deliver the core elements of their organisation’s brand identity and promise. Therefore, executives must start by engaging their employees and then taking these steps to help their workers become effective brand ambassadors.

Gallup recommends the following benchmarks for enabling your organisation to become an employer of choice, as well as giving you competitive advantage based on outstanding internal alignment, cohesion and engagement:

1. Acknowledge that all employees play a key role in bringing your brand to life. Successful branding is not just a marketing or sales function; it is an essential activity for human resources, management, and leadership.
2. Audit your internal communications to ensure that they are consistent with your brand identity and promise. Invest in making employees aware of your brand promise, and empower them to act on it.
3. Articulate what your brand represents and what you promise to your customers. Inject the core elements of your identity into the workplace constantly and consistently across time, locations, and channels. Use these elements to define not only how you treat your customers but also how you manage, coach, and treat your employees.
4. Deploy simple processes to ensure that you highlight and discuss the core elements of your company’s brand identity every day. Use minute meetings, lineups, or staff gatherings to provide specific examples of how to deliver the brand promise.
5. Use simple tools such as wallet cards as ready references to the brand, and require employees to memorise the key brand elements.
6. Regularly assess how well your employees know and understand your brand promise. All employees, especially those in customer-facing roles, should believe in and feel they have the resources and permission to deliver your brand promise. Provide additional support in areas that fall short.
7. Ensure that new employees understand your brand identity and promise. All new employees should be able to articulate what your company stands for and what makes you different within their first 30 days of employment, and your managers should reinforce this message every day.
8. Make sure that every employee understands how his or her job affects the customer experience. This is particularly important for roles that are not customer-facing. Constantly connect the dots between what employees are paid to do and what your organisation stands for.
9. Recognise employees who deliver your brand promise to your customers. Recognition is an important psychological need. Employees who know they will receive recognition for acting on the brand promise will have a strong incentive to do so.
10. Regularly solicit opinions from your employees on new and better ways to deliver your brand promise. Convene town hall meetings that allow employees to share their ideas and receive feedback. Demonstrating an authentic commitment to alignment is the best way to embed it in your company’s culture.

It is worth repeating that only 13% of the world’s workers are engaged in their jobs. Given the proven links between employee engagement and financial outcomes, if organisations worldwide could find a way 
to double the number of engaged employees, it would dramatically improve their balance sheets and change the world’s entire economic trajectory for the better.

In the final Blog for this series on engagement, next week we will outline what it is that the best do differently. We will offer Gallup’s recommendations for emulating market leaders as a means to joining them in the lofty heights of employee and customer engagement. Discover how to ensure that engagement levels are high, that employees enjoy their work and operate in a cohesive and harmonious manner, that customers are happy brand ambassadors, and that the balance sheet reflects all of this with robust profits.

Those are some pretty great reasons to make employee engagement a top priority for your organisation in 2015.

Credit: The image used in this blog is taken from Galllup's State Of The Global Workforce Report 2013.