BY STEVEN WINOKUR

Your front-line employees have a tremendous amount of influence over the experience a customer has with your company. The simple mistake many managers make is that they simply expect the employee to do the right thing. The question is, what is the right thing? Without expressing to your employees how you want them to act, they’ll act according to their own impression of how they think they should act.

This gets right into the next comment – don’t skimp on training. Once you start building the customer-centric culture and measuring the experience, you need make sure all your employees understand how you (as the manager or business owner) want them to act. Is the number #1 priority making sure the customer is happy, no matter what? Is it something else? Whatever it is, your employees need to understand it.

Communicate is key here – employees must have a clear understanding of how they are expected to act. A big part of that is simply defining what you would define as good behavior. Once that’s done, you can work on measuring it and incenting it. Let’s look at an example in a call center.

If the desired behavior is for the call center agents to solve the caller’s issue on the first call, then you should track first call resolution numbers. But, make sure then you incent on that – don’t incent on call time. It doesn’t do much good to say we want to solve problems on the first call and then incent people on how quickly they get customers off the line. It is inconsistencies like this that can cause a customer experience initiative to fail.

How a customer uses your product or service is only part of the experience. How your employees interact with customers goes a long way toward how a customer views the experience with your company. You can influence those interactions – just remember to communicate to your employees how you want them to act. Then back that up with training, measuring and incenting to ensure the behavior you want is actually occurring.

Next, we’ll look at everyone’s favorite word, Innovate.

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