Success is a Journey
Posted by Nancy Porte on Thu, Sep 15, 2011
For the past few months I’ve been discussing ways of better understanding your customer through journey mapping. To my delight, many of you have mapped the customer journey and are actively gathering feedback, gaining insights and improving your customer experiences. So, what is the next step? Well, how about taking the customer experience mapping techniques and applying them to your employees?
Surprised? You shouldn’t be.
Research reveals that employee engagement directly correlates to customer engagement. At the same time, less than 33% of employees are engaged with their jobs. And, if you still think that employee engagement is just a “nice to have”, consider this - corporations listed in Fortune's "100 Best Companies to Work For in America" had equity returns that
were 3.5% per year higher than those of their peers, indicating that employee satisfaction correlates positively with shareholder returns, says Alex Edmans of the Wharton School.
So it makes sense to understand the interactions, challenges and sentiment of employees. As one blogger boldly stated, “While organizations are focused on Voice of the Customer programs, employees are still stuck trying to access the information they need with over a dozen usernames and passwords, can’t find the right information they need to get their jobs done, feel disconnected from their companies, spend a full day a week in front of email, can’t find the right people to collaborate with, don’t know how to share their ideas, can’t store or transfer their knowledge for others, and a host of other things.” So savvy organizations are using mapping techniques to gather feedback, provide training opportunities and streamline internal procedures.
Like many customer-facing systems and processes, many employee-facing systems have been setup to make it more efficient for the organization rather than useful for the employee. Using experience mapping techniques, these systems could be seen from the employee’s view and improvements identified. It would also be possible to correlate individual events and outcomes. For example, one company found that setting up a buddy program resulted in faster ramping for selling complex, high-margin products. Another company found that a new security policy had unforeseen, negative responses by employees. By identifying this perception early, the managers were able to provide more information and remove obstacles which impacted employee engagement and, most importantly, would have gone unseen without the gathering of feedback.
In addition to front line employees, what other voices influence your customers’ experiences? What about partners? Back office teams? Experience mapping and gathering customer feedback from each group that influences customer satisfaction can reveal opportunities to increase the quality of customer interactions and, ultimately, the quality of the relationship.
Mapping external and internal experiences can sound like an overwhelming task but with the right resources, it can be done! While there are service design firms that can assist with very complex situations, many maps can be created and monitored by customer experience teams equipped with the right tools and knowledge.
The Vovici Voice of the Customer program has used a methodology for developing a customer experience wheel that has the flexibility to be used for journey mapping, gathering feedback and acting on insights. Working with Steve Elliott, CTO and VP of Products, we are developing a tool which can be used to visualize each process step. The tool is still in its early stages, but if you would like to help us in the development process, I invite you to visit Steve’s recent blog and volunteer for participation. Those who volunteer will be able to develop a branded process map showing all of their listening posts, moments of truth and add satisfaction and loyalty status. The tool is completely wizard driven so the interactive journey maps will be dynamically generated.
The Voice of the Customer is critical to a growing organization. Listening to the customer voice requires an understanding of all interactions from the customer view, a view from the outside in. Since employee engagement impacts customer engagement and loyalty, employee experience mapping can be accomplished using many of the same tools and techniques as customer experience mapping. There are many benefits to listening to and taking action on employee feedback, including more engaged employees, lower turnover and, of course, happier customers.