Three Ways to Engage the Organization in CX

Organizations with high employee engagement also tend to deliver a superior customer experience. When we talk about employee engagement, we’re often referring to customer-facing employees.

However, employees who are not customer-facing - legal, IT, accounting and HR for example - can also influence the customer experience. Pricing, billing, contracts and compliance notifications can be clear or confusing and have a positive or negative impact on CX.

How do high-performing brands engage employees across the organization to focus on the customer experience? While several examples come to mind, in this post, lets explore three.

1. Immersion Labs and Clinics

One approach to engaging the organization is to establish a program that connects frontline employees with employees who are deeper in the organization.

At one healthcare company, the head of call center operations established an “adopt a supervisor program” to connect staff executives from legal, IT and other functions with frontline supervisors. Each week, the supervisor and staff executive would meet to listen to recent calls into the contact center. The experience was eye-opening for the staff executives and a morale booster for the frontline.

The J.D. Power Call Immersion Clinic functions similarly - we gather together product managers, staff functions and even senior executives to listen to customer conversations in a controlled, facilitated environment. While the immersion sessions may highlight specific product, service or process improvement opportunities, they play a more strategic role in creating awareness of the importance of the role employees play in the customer experience.
 
2. Employees as Beta Testers

Enrolling employees and other inside stakeholders is a proven method for testing new products and services before releasing to customers. In 2018, Tesla offered employees up to $13,000 in savings to test a full self-driving capability.

More recent examples include Apple Store retail employees testing Apple Pay Later and Google employees testing Bard, the company’s answer to ChatGPT. Airbnb Experiences runs an invite-only program where Airbnb employees, Superhosts and other members of the community try new in-person and online experiences at a reduced cost or even free.

Tesla, Apple, Google and Airbnb are all examples of getting employees from across the company to engage with and better understand their role in the customer experience journey by putting themselves directly in the shoes of the customer.

3. Listening Posts

Setting up listening posts is another way to connect employees that may not be customer-facing to customer feedback. At Adobe, the XD product team set up a listening post by partnering with the user community to release early versions of the software for feedback.

By launching this engagement channel with real customers, product managers and engineers were able to gain a better understanding of customer needs and gather the evidence required to advocate for the customer in design reviews and prioritize fixes. 

As the product manager for Adobe puts it – “As a product team and as a business, customer listening is not only an asset, it’s essential for making a product that your users love.”

Customer listening also helps employees that are not already in direct contact with customers understand how customers feel about their products and services and where they can focus their time and attention to engage with and improve those experiences.

Wrap Up

In customer-centric organizations, CX is everyone’s job. Immersing employees in the customer experience through feedback loops and product and service interactions creates and sustains real connections between someone’s job and customer touchpoints.

Engaging the organization in CX is key to delivering both an outstanding employee and customer experience. How do you engage the rest of the organization in CX?  Share your examples and we’ll highlight them in a future article.

About the Author: Michael Vermillion leads CX improvement consulting for J.D. Power and works with CX-focused organizations to develop, align and execute CX strategy.

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