Shaw Happy Employees Make Happy Customers

How Build Great Employee Engagement to Create a Great Customer Experience
1. Auflage 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5439-7046-3
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 200 Seiten

Happy Employees Make Happy Customers: How to build great employee engagement to create a great customer experience By Colin Shaw Colin Shaw's new eBook, Happy Employees Make Happy Customers, explores the relationship between your employee engagement and your customer experience. Shaw is the founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy, one of the world's first organizations devoted to customer experience. He explains how organizations should have combined and complementary customer and employee experience improvement programs. Employee engagement occurs when people feel committed to the company's mission. Like the most successful customer experience programs, the employees have an emotional connection to the company and enjoy personal satisfaction from their actions on the organization's behalf. Many companies understand having an excellent customer experience is the next competitive differentiator for organizations. Fewer of them, however, understand the importance of creating an employee experience that mirrors the customer experience. Happy Employees Make Happy Customers describes what it takes to evoke the proper emotions from employees so they can deliver outstanding customer experience. He discusses why the employee experience matters, how to hire the right employees and what to look for in the people you bring on board. He reviews the significance of training and maintaining the employee experience. He also covers the employee's responsibility in the relationship and how leadership can foster the proper environment for success. Finally, he shares examples of companies that promote an environment conducive to employee engagement and retention-and those who don't. Shaw illustrates his ideas with examples from headlines and stories from his career to give these concepts life. With his natural storytelling style and focus on practicality, Happy Employees Make Happy Customers helps organizations take their employee experience to the next level and elevate the

Autoren/Hrsg.

Shaw, Colin

Leseproben

Chapter 2 Hiring the Right Employees for the Job In the last chapter, we discussed the importance of creating happy and engaged employees to improve your employee and customer experience. Now, we’ll explore the hiring phase. Hiring the right people should be a priority for most organizations, particularly when filling a position that works directly with customers. It always surprises me how few organizations do the groundwork to attract and recruit the right people for these positions. Many organizations don’t even know who the “right people” are that they seek. Jay Forte, the workplace consultant who wrote Fire Up! Your Employees, coined the term “customer-ready.” These are the people who are ready to “deliver (the) exceptional service” that you want for your customers.9 But, he adds, while most organizations have a strong desire for customer-ready employees, they haven’t defined what that exceptional service is. Photo by: Ilixe4 I blame the lack of a Customer Experience Statement (CES), which defines the customer experience you want to provide. The CES tells employees what the end goal is for any decision they make. The CES describes how an organization wants to create customer loyalty and retention. The CES defines the emotions you are trying to evoke in your customers. Once you determine what you want, you hire people who have the talent for evoking these emotions. The ability to evoke this particular set of emotions is what your organization defines as “customer-ready.” If you’re hiring customer-facing employees without a CES, how can you know what type of employee you’re looking for? The answer is simple: you can’t. To hire the right people, you have to define who the “right people” are. In our third book, The DNA of Customer Experience (Palgrave MacMIllan, 2007), we explored how some of our clients accomplished this feat extraordinarily well using a CES. Build-A-Bear Workshop’s goal is to supply a consistent experience that makes customers feel cared for and focuses on their individual needs. If you haven’t visited one of their stores, the idea is that you customize a stuffed animal with different accessories to represent your ideal toy. When the founder of the company and former “Chief Executive Bear” Maxine Clark hired employees, she searched for people who could guide their customers down the path of their experience so that “by the time they [customers] were done, they had created the most personalized gift possible.” In other words, she sought people who made Build-A-Bear’s customers feel cared for, one of the emotions that drive value for an organization. Clark said this in our book: “We hire people with this kind of passion and energy. The first thing we look for is people who care. You can train people how to work registers and how to do numbers, but you can’t train people to care, that’s what they come with from their background, from their work experience.” Clark’s strategy worked. The company grew to 400 stores worldwide. Her strategy of matching the right people to these positions earned her Fast Company’s “Customer-Centered Leader” in 2005’s Customer First Awards. Also, at the time, Build-A-Bear Workshop made Fortune’s list of “Best Companies to Work For” five years running. Hiring someone for a job they can’t do results in challenges for everyone, from managers to clients to employees. You can’t identify the right people and match them to a position unless you know what you think comprises a candidate who is customer-ready. At Beyond Philosophy, there are traits we look for in candidates, qualities we all agree are essential to success on our team. What customer-ready means to you might be different, but I offer this list as an example of what I mean by this concept. The following five characteristics have served the members of my team well. Emotional Intelligence. People with high emotional intelligence (EQ) can control their emotions and influence the emotions of others. Research indicates they are also good at getting people to do what they want. I hire candidates with high EQs knowing full well their ability to get people to do what they want applies to me. However, I’m okay with that, because they’re also the most likely to develop employee engagement, an essential ingredient of delivering the Beyond Philosophy brand promise. Positive Attitude. Does the candidate have that positive, can-do attitude? You can train a lot of things, but an attitude isn’t one of them. Initiative. Personal initiative is critical when hiring. We like to see how the candidate uses their initiative to prepare for the interview—or doesn’t. Many people turn up for interviews without doing the preparation. The candidates that impress me most are the ones who are proactive, not reactive. Sound Reasoning. I ask people to come in with a 100-day plan, which, as the name implies, is the plan for their first hundred days with our organization. I judge the idea by how they present it and the thought behind it. I have people who wing it. I also have people who spend a great deal of time and give a professional presentation. Guess which candidate I hire? Independent Working Skills. I have a virtual team with offices all over the world. In this virtual world, you must delegate a task and trust the person to do it. I once had an assistant who worked well in the office. However, when we converted to working from home, she couldn’t handle it. Whenever I spoke to her, she was always doing the washing or ironing or something else. She was an independent worker, just not on my stuff. If you’re going to run a virtual team, you need to trust they will work. I say to my staff, “I don’t care where you work in the world as long as you work.” Some people are going to do this, and some aren’t. The ones I hire are the former, not the latter. My job is to select candidates with these skills and natural talents and then match them to the proper job. If it isn’t a quality match, the candidate might fail, and I will have failed the candidate. But I have a confession to make. People sway me without difficulty, making me an easy interview. Despite my status as a hiring wally, however, I’ve hired many fantastic people in my career. How? To quote a fellow Brit, “I get by with a little help from my friends.” I enlist people from across the organization to interview the person as well. It also helps the candidate, as they can speak to a cross-section of people here. A High EQ is Essential to Customer-Ready Employees I’ve always been an advocate of psychological testing during the hiring process to measure the candidate’s emotional intelligence. Also, look for essential characteristics of the type of EQ you need to deliver your experience. Using these guidelines, you can identify customer-ready candidates. EQ is one of the key attributes of not only good customer-ready employees, but also for the customer experience professional themselves. Having someone with a high EQ is an advantage in many ways. There are five domains of EQ.10 Knowing your emotions Managing your emotions Motivating yourself Recognizing and understanding other people’s emotions Managing relationships, i.e. managing the emotions of others Individuals with high EQs can read their own emotions and discover why they feel that way, a useful skill for a customer experience professional. A sharp customer experience professional will also recognize the emotions in others. This ability is useful both externally and internally. Externally, the customer experience professional interprets customers’ emotions by their behavior. Internally, the same professional understands the team members’ feelings by their behavior. We all know that improving an experience means lots of change and working across many organizational silos. Inevitably, politics will come to the fore. Some people see your proposal to improve the experience as a threat and will resist it. Managing your emotions is also crucial. The role of a customer experience professional can be challenging. You may need to manage your frustration at the lack of engagement from people in the organization, or ensure you don’t panic at the size of the task ahead. Finally, working cross-functionally means you need skills in managing relationships at all levels of the organization. The customer experience professional needs the ability to get things done without being seen as a political threat. They need to show they have a balanced approach to all parts of the organization and can be evenhanded. If having a high EQ is a distinct advantage for customer experience professionals, it’s even more vital for your customer-facing employees. As I mentioned in the previous chapter, employee engagement is a critical factor in having a great customer experience. Since so much of...