12th March 2020 Event Takeaways

It’s time to transform your employee and customer experience

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“The way you treat your employees is the way they will treat your customers” – Richard Branson

What can we do to create better employee and customer experiences? That was the question asked at yesterday's Transform Your Employee & Customer Experience event, hosted by Customer Radar and HROnboard – and it turns out that a lot of what we can do will help improve both.


Read on to hear some of our experts’ top advice from the event – or skip ahead to the section most relevant to your business.

Owning your onboarding

(Peter Forbes)

Although HR experts often talk about ‘from hire to retire’, our panel of experts agreed that when it comes to creating a fantastic employee experience, onboarding should be a key focus.

“Induction has a huge impact on retention, productivity, employee engagement, and more,” shared Peter Forbes, founder of HROnboard. “But there are some big challenges involved – namely, who owns the onboarding process? Is it your recruitment team or your ‘talent management’ team? Onboarding should be a multi-disciplinary event – it’s a team sport.”

 

A great onboarding experience carries with it a huge number of benefits, including:

  • - Improved time to productivity
  • - Reduction in errors & manual work
  • - Visibility, feedback & insights
  • - Great experience & retention
  • - Alignment with company & culture
  • - Early immersion in meaningful work

Creating a great onboarding experience doesn’t have to be expensive or hard – consider Hard Rock Café, who were opening a new restaurant. They knew that it would be difficult to create a great culture from scratch, so as they hired new recruits, they would add them to a private Facebook group. Within the group, new recruits started to interact and share stories – and by the time they showed up on the first day, they already had a real connection with each other.

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Creating an employee experience that mirrors your CX

(Edan Haddock)

Edan Haddock, Talent Manager for flybuys Australia, shared their story of being a ‘25-year-old start-up’ – moving from a division under Coles to being a brand in their own right. Unlike most start-ups, they already had the people – but they didn’t know what their employer brand was.


So, they went straight to the source – meeting with every employee and finding out what their journeys looked like.

“Our employer brand became ‘Find your place’ – basically, what does working at flybuys look like for you?”

From attaching GoPros to three employees to show a day in the life of a flybuys employee to sharing stories of individual employees, flybuys have been doing an epic job at sharing that employer brand – and now they’re giving new employees the chance to experience onboarding their way as well.

“If you’re hired and then hear nothing for the next four weeks, of course you’re going to be nervous on your first day. On our platform, they’re fed a little bit of information every couple of days in the weeks leading up to when they start, so that we keep up the connection throughout – and they’re not nervous at all about starting their new role.”

 

Building a foundation of customer-centric leadership

(Mel Rowsell)

Too often businesses will fall into the trap of looking at their employee and customer experiences as two very separate areas. But to create truly great customer experiences, you need to put the customers at the heart of your culture, your values, and your employee experience.

 

“A lot of businesses are very inward looking – especially if they’ve been quite successful or have grown very quickly,” explains Mel Rowsell of Wisdom at Work. “If you’ve had some early success, it’s quite easy to forget about the customer – but that’s a trap to avoid.”

 

To build a great customer experience, you need to be looking outward. And in your efforts to look outward, your leaders are the best tool you have.

“Your culture is like a machine – there are multiple knobs and buttons you can push to tune it up. One of the most powerful levers is your leaders.” In fact, if you’re leaders aren’t on board with improving your CX, says Mel, it simply won’t work well.

 

So, what can you do to ensure that your leaders on board and putting your customers at the heart of your business?

  1. - Explain it in terms of what they care about (such as the impact on the bottom line);
  2. - Elect a Chief Customer Officer;
  3. - Consider having a ‘customer seat’ at the leadership table;
  4. - Test every decision you make for its impact on customer;
  5. - Include customer impact in your 1:1s and performance reviews;
  6. - Take your leadership team on a site visit to a customer; and
  7. - Start walking the walk instead of just talking the talk 

This may feel like a lot, but the great thing is, it doesn’t have to be overwhelming. 


“What’s your minimum effective dose?” asks Mel. “What are the parts you can take back and start improving now?” Whether it’s buying a ‘customer hat’ to put on and advocate for your customer or putting your customer success stories up around the office, there are easy ways to start putting customers at the heart of the business. Get your leaders on board, start bringing customer experience to life, and you’ll bring the rest of the team along for the ride too.

Mel recommends that a great way to get started is conducting a culture health check to get started. To do that, book a free 25 minute consultation with her at https://www.melrowsell.co.nz/ (or check out her awesome game Cards Against Complacency to help you drive more effective conversations and decision making: https://www.cardsagainstcomplacency.com/ ).

 

 

Mapping your CX & EX to own your critical moments

(Briana Millar)

When they started their CX journey at the beginning of 2018, professional services firm Tonkin + Tonkin had to challenge many of the assumptions they – and their team – were making.

One of their most significant assumptions was that customers were coming to them for their technical expertise more than their customer experience.

By speaking in depth to over 100 clients in-depth about their challenges, their desires, and their thoughts on Tonkin + Tonkin, they realised two things:

  1. - That most clients were desperate for soft skills like relationship building and communication
  2. - Delivering at key moments within a customer's journey will set you apart


They soon developed a journey map and highlighted to their team when to do what – and  how to do it. However, they knew they could be doing better.

“We thought ‘How can we do this differently? How can we elevate our customer experience?’ It all comes down to EX,” shares Customer Experience Manager Briana Millar.

 

The team started talking to their employees in a similar way to how they’d talked to customers – finding out the moments that mattered to them and mapping out the employee journey in much the same way they had mapped the customer journey. By prioritising the critical points of recruitment and onboarding, they started to build an employer brand that better reflected their focus on customers – finding candidates that aligned to this focus, then helping new people learn that “this is just what we do”.

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Measure your CX; grow your business

(Mat Wylie)

Last year, Customer Radar interviewed some of Australasia’s top CEOs and business leaders and asked them one key question: What are your biggest challenges?


Across the board, virtually all of them had the same two answers:

  1. - They wanted to empower and grow their people
  2. - They wanted to retain customers and grow

 

Good leaders know that their customers and their people are the two keys to business success – but how do you go from knowing that you should be improving to actually doing so?

It’s all about what you can measure.


“If you don’t know how you’re performing from a CX point of view, you’re flying blind,” explained Mat Wylie, CEO & Founder of Customer Radar. “It’s like that old saying that what you measure you can manage, and what you manage gets done.”

 

That’s why it’s vital that you incorporate a CX metric into your business, such as NPS (Net Promoter Score). More than that, though. A great example of a business living and breathing their CX metric is Jucy – visit their office and you’ll spot screens showing live updates of their Customer Radar dashboard not just in the CEO’s office, but throughout the whole space (for more on their CX journey, check out this case study).

By bringing the voice of your customers into your business and being open with that data with the whole team, you’ll get far more engagement. Your people are far more likely to own the customer experience.

While that’s important from a warm fuzzy point of view, it’s also vital from a business growth point of view. Based on the millions of pieces of feedback that have come through the Customer Radar system, we find that an average of 25% of customers are either unhappy or neutral about their experiences.

 

“That’s 25% of your customers who could easily be poached by a competitor, but equally, that’s 25% of your competitors’ customers who are up for grabs if you can provide a superior customer experience,” explains Mat. “If you’re able to identify where you can improve – and actually make those improvements – you’ve got a huge opportunity to retain and gain more customers.”

 

Let’s look at how that works in action

Take a Customer Radar client who took over an established business only last year. They knew that their financials weren’t showing them the whole picture and needed an understanding of which areas of the business most needed improving, so they took an NPS Pulse to get a benchmark of their customer experience. They were surprised to find that some branches (such as one based at an airport) had high sales but extremely low conversions, as customers were mostly unhappy. Other branches had lower foot traffic and lower sales but very high conversions and a high NPS score. They immediately got a clearer view of what was working and where there were opportunities for improvement and since then have implemented regular NPS feedback in order to create more happy customers and grow the business (because we know that happy customers create growth!)


Although the event saw a panel of experts share their unique experiences across the employee and customer journeys, there were two things they all agreed on: that employee and customer experience are intrinsically linked; and that you’re better to start simple and start today than keep putting it off.


Get a snapshot of what’s happening in your business through an NPS Customer Feedback Pulse and start your CX journey today. 



KEY TAKEAWAYS: 

- CX and EX are two sides of the same coin. If you make your EX better, your CX will inevitably improve as well; and if you put customers at the heart of your employee experience, you will build a team of customer-focused high performers.
- Onboarding is a key stage in creating a fantastic employee experience; own this and both retention and productivity will improve.
- Recruitment and onboarding are both awesome opportunities to put the customer at the heart of your culture; consider how to include customer-centricity into this stage.
- If you’re not measuring your CX, and asking your customers what they think, how do you know what to improve?
- CX and EX are both an evolution – not a revolution. Get a benchmark of where you’re at, then continuously improve your processes, systems, culture, and behaviours.
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