What's with your Attitude? (pt 2)

EX begets CX: How your employees feel about working for you is a reflection of how your Customers feel about buying from you.

Do a search of which companies do best in Customer Experience ("CX") and you'll find that those same companies have fanatical employees. Many of the companies that come to mind have achieved almost mythical levels of CX and employee satisfaction; the likes of Southwest Airlines or USAA are nearly always on someone's "best of" list.

"That's all well and good," you might ask, "but what about us mere mortals?"

The fact is, the accolades that CX leaders receive can be a bit daunting. Have you ever sat in a review looking at your Net Promoter Score (NPS) when they show the slide with "best in class" performance for comparison? Silently you wondered what miracles would have to happen for your company to achieve that type of performance? It's OK if you answer "yes" because we've all been there. But there is hope.

It doesn't take a miracle to get there, it just takes diligent and intentional work. Your own existing infrastructure can help point the way. Start with your internal employee survey. If you don't have one, start one ASAP. Your employee survey? Yes!

Best-in-class CX leaders use their own VoE feedback (Voice of the Employee) as a leading indicator of where their VoC feedback (Voice of the Customer) is going.

The rationale is simple: employees are customer advocates. In areas where employees find it easy to support their customers, both the VoE score and the VoC score will be better. Where employees are unhappy, chances are good that your customers are unhappy too.

One company stack-ranked their Sales teams by their "employee NPS". When they compared the top-half of the stack to the bottom half of the stack, they found a 7-pt difference in customer NPS. Extending the analysis, they found an even more significant difference in sale revenues!

What does that mean to you? Here are five steps you should take:

1. Start collecting Employee NPS. "How likely are you to recommend [us] as a great place to work?" If you aren't an NPS shop, then use a question that closely aligns to the same question you ask your customers. Using the same question enables you to draw parallels, do correlations, etc.
2. Understand the root-causes for high and low employee NPS. Remember, your employee's frustrations are / become customer frustrations.
3. Break down silos and organizational barriers to solve employee / customer problems. Your customer ideally sees you as one company, but things go badly astray when they see your in-fighting and conflicting agendas. Resolve those!
4. Celebrate wins, encourage more open feedback. The best revolutions are grass-roots and people-led. Let your workforce lead you to a better place, and celebrate with them when they do.
5. Rinse and repeat. Nothing shows commitment like perseverance. Your customers may or may not be looking for a real change. You can bet your life that your employees are. It's one thing to throw a party and buy lunch for everyone... once. It's an entirely different deal when you start running the same internal survey twice a year and taking real substantive actions as a result.

You'll notice that I didn't once say "compare yourself to best-in-class performance." If you're chasing someone then you are, by definition, behind. Remedy employee feedback as a path to better customer feedback. Trust your employees to show you how awesome you can be, and empower them to help you get there. Who knows, maybe you'll become "best in class" without ever once comparing yourself to whoever used to be #1.

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