Best Practices in Action: How to Drive Employee Engagement and Business Success

At J.D. Power, we have hundreds of best practices for customer care and tech support organizations that are routinely found together in top performers but are rarely implemented together elsewhere. In this month’s blog, I’ll share several specific best practices straight from our Best Practices Scorecard¹ and tie them together with a quick case study from an organization which utilized these practices to drive phenomenal results.

The first practice, one of seven in our Reinforcing Culture Through Communication category, states that “successes and challenges of the organization are communicated” from leadership to the frontline. This practice is key as it has the power to galvanize the organization around strengths and what needs to be done to get to the next level of performance. The “challenges” communicated should be used to engage the organization around the frontline, utilizing those closest to the customer to help solve the issues.

Best Practice in Action: When working with a large global organization, we observed that leadership was brutally honest about challenges around customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction, specifically the morale of the agents. In some centers, we saw attrition rates of well over 150% annually, which was a lagging indicator of poor morale and a primary cause of sub-optimal performance. After a prioritization exercise, it was determined that a renewed focus on employee engagement and employee satisfaction would reduce agent attrition and enable more employees to remain in their positions long enough to become proficient and help improve customer satisfaction. By communicating these challenges and engaging the organization in the solution, the company was able to address the issues they were facing and make improvements to the employee experience.

The next four best practices exhibited by this organization are among the 38 that make up our Employee Engagement category. The practices are:

1. Management solicits employee feedback (even as anonymous) on ideas to improve customer satisfaction, First Contact Resolution, and employee engagement for the purpose of including it in the next year's strategy.
2. Results of the feedback on how to improve customer satisfaction, First Contact Resolution, and employee engagement from the front line is gathered by management and published (in summary form) to the front line prior to the presentation of the year's strategy, goals, objectives, etc.
3. There is a written action plan formed around the results of the measurement of front-line employee engagement.
4. There is individual accountability for improvement based on feedback.

Best Practices in Action: Management solicited feedback and conducted several root cause sessions with the frontline. Through these sessions, it was determined that a huge problem was how coaching was being executed across their large network of centers. Some did it well, some did not, but there was a lack of consistency in how agents were coached, and this resulted in challenges, especially when one agent was moved to another supervisor. In addition to the consistency issue, two huge problems emerged from the frontlines: 1.) only bad calls were being called out and coached to; and 2.) the agents felt uninvolved in the process and “talked down to.” With limited bandwidth, supervisors could only cover a few calls and selected the bad ones to try to get at the negative behaviors they saw consistently. While this sounds reasonable, it resulted in what agents saw as largely one-way communication that felt punitive rather than consultative. These were among the most significant causes of the morale issue.  

With feedback solicited, it was time to develop and document a plan, which this organization wisely used as another engagement opportunity. It became clear that a coaching model had to be developed, and by engaging employees in this process, the organization was able to leverage suggestions directly from frontline agents to build this model. They suggested emphasizing a consistent set of goals for each coaching session, identifying a few very specific objectives, determining which contacts would be reviewed first (good calls or problematic calls), and, most importantly, clarifying that the session would be approached with the agent leading the call review. The agents that contributed to this design were recognized and celebrated which is an important part of the process. While supervisors, managers, directors and VPs could have made similar suggestions, they learned over time that they got much more bang for the buck when they engaged agents to discover these practices on their own. This meant that management had to be intentional about going through the process and perhaps take a little more time on the front end, but because the ideas came from the agents and were rewarded and recognized so heavily, the speed of adoption and execution was far better and was well worth the slight delay. Additionally, the agents felt like they were contributing and had an opportunity to make an impact on the organization, which lifted morale. We found that even though most reps didn’t have their ideas recognized and implemented, the simple fact that everyone could see that agents were being listened to and making an impact improved morale significantly and helped change the culture. Not all solutions can be managed this way, but when the problem is affecting the agents the most, it is an absolute imperative to involve the agents in the solution process in a significant way.

With the feedback gathered, published, and addressed with a plan, leadership added a symbolic gesture of accountability to ensure the program got off the ground. In this organization’s case, they had sponsorship from senior leadership which included the leaders “signing” their names next to the problems identified signifying their commitment to ensure that resources were provided to solve the issue as documented.

As the success of the new coaching model and approach grew, the organization kept on celebrating improvements seen among teams utilizing the approach, recognizing each manager with the supervisors who had the greatest improvement in customer and employee facing KPI’s, and pushing each “center” to have the greatest improvement overall. To confirm and communicate the company’s continuous commitment to the model, they utilized a best practice from the Problem Solving category: “Status/progress on continuous improvement initiatives are communicated to all contact center personnel at least quarterly, i.e., Town Hall, Newsletter, company portal, team huddles, etc.” 

By incorporating multiple best practices based on both VoE and VoC insights into their operations, this organization was able to transform its culture, employee engagement and morale. Additionally, the organization has mastered key elements to building and maintaining a continuous improvement machine that starts with actionable CX insights and focuses on engaging employees to help turn prioritized challenges into big wins for employees, the company, and the customer.    


If you're looking for help improving customer service and employee engagement, contact our team today. Let us help your team get focused on the right actions to improve your business. 

¹The J.D. Power Best Practice Scorecard is a compilation of best practices identified from verified, validated, and Customer Service Certified top-performing customer service operations over the past 20 years. To be J.D. Power certified an operation must achieve top 20% performance in customer satisfaction as rated in a survey by those who have had a recent customer service interaction. Certified clients must also pass an operational evaluation achieving a minimum score of 80% of the required practices. The Best Practice Scorecard for 2023 contains over 300 practices across 21 operational categories.

About the Author: Mark Miller leads the J.D. Power Global Customer Service Advisory and is responsible for thought leadership, solutions development, strategic alliances and client support. He leads customer service, technical support and sales performance improvement and certification initiatives for the company.

Where to find more insights like this:
This blog post was featured in the Customer Service Advice & Insights monthly newsletter. Make sure you're signed up to get the latest customer service channel intelligence >