Today's post comes to us from Workforce Institute board member, Natalie Bickford, Group HR Director at Merlin Entertainments. Here she discusses the power of "Don't ask your manager" to unleash your frontline employees ability to provide a great customer experience.

As I'm working day-to-day trying to figure out how to best motivate and engage employees, I am often reminded of Frederick Herzberg's “Two Factor Theory”. Developed way back in 1959, Herzberg's theory posits that there are certain factors in the workplace that cause job satisfaction while a separate set of factors cause dissatisfaction, all of which act independently of each other.

A key way to drive employee engagement is through giving each team member as much responsibility as possible. Yes, of course pay, working conditions and respectful management (Herzberg would call these “hygiene factors”) are important in the avoidance of dissatisfaction, but if you really want your people to go the extra mile, you must recognize their contribution and give them as much decision making authority and accountability as possible (“motivation factors” in Herzberg's theory).

This scenario is easy to imagine within an office-based, professional workforce environment, but how can this work in a world of hourly paid, consumer-facing employees? Finding a solution to this can make a significant difference to the consumer experience in environments where the lowest paid workers are the ones delivering the customer experience on a daily basis - think retail, hospitality, casual dining, and even to some degree airlines. We absolutely know from the service-profit chain model that a clear connection exists between high profits, customer loyalty and employee productivity and satisfaction. 

At the Pret a Manger sandwich chain, existing team members are made accountable for the selection of new team members. Short-listed candidates work for a paid day in the store, and at the end of the shift the team decides who fits the company culture best. By empowering the team to make hiring decisions, the whole team feels jointly accountable for the financial performance and guest experience in their outlet. At Pret, teams are also encouraged to hand out free coffees and baked goods on a Friday to improve the consumer experience and drive loyalty. 

Within a number of my employer, Merlin Entertainments', visitor attractions, guest hosts are empowered to give special gifts to guests of their choosing, including ride fast-passes, snacks, retail merchandise and free entry tickets. There is no direct benefit to the employee other than the opportunity to make someone's day. As a result, however, employee engagement within those attractions has ticked up.

Organizations that push accountability to the front line know that employees will step up and grab it.  Little things like being allowed to make decisions about replacing a dropped ice cream for a crying child, refunding an elderly gentleman who has purchased the wrong charging cable, pulling a disabled guest to the front of a queue - all make employees feel valued and responsible for business outcomes.

Southwest Airlines defied all odds in the post 9/11 impact on the domestic US airline industry, remaining profitable and holding its' ranking in Fortune magazine's “Most Admired Companies” list.  A major contributing factor to this was Southwest Airlines' obsessive protection of their desire to do the right thing by their passengers, actively supported by the accountability given their ground staff and crew to do just that.

We would all benefit from taking a cold hard look at our employee handbooks and regulations, and asking ourselves which rules and processes can we strip away, and how can we put more power into the hands of our staff? Organizations are very good at adding processes and policies but not very adept at stripping them back. My preferred way to consider this is by standing in the shoes of my guests and thinking about what I would want to see from the people who are delivering the guest experience to me. One of my most hated responses as a customer is “I'm sorry, but I will have to ask my manager…!”

What about you? Have you been wowed by great customer service somewhere lately? What's the phrase you can't stand to hear from a customer service person? Tell us about it in the comments section!

This blog post is submitted by Joyce Maroney, Executive Director of the Workforce Institute at Kronos.  

Your employees and customers are talking about you online whether or not you build an online community platform for them.  Many organizations, though, are actively hosting communities that enable communication between their employees, and between their employees and customers or partners.  Doing so requires a level of transparency and authentic communication that may feel foreign or risky for some organizations.

I recently recorded a podcast with Leo Daley, Director of the Kronos Community, and his colleague Melissa Spinella, Community Manager.  The Kronos Community was built on the Salesforce.com platform. Launched in 2016, it now has almost 50,000 members worldwide. Leo and Melissa have learned a lot about how to launch and manage an online community over the last three years. You can listen to our conversation below to learn about::

Click on the player below to listen in on our conversation.

You can also explore the Kronos Community by clicking here. Because this community is very "open", you can browse much of its content without logging in. Feel free to explore.

Kronos has a long track record of building our business by creating satisfied and loyal customers.  As this most recent press release concerning our Q2 financial performance confirms, our growth has been consistently strong, even as we've transitioned our technology to the cloud, expanded globally and earned numerous awards for our culture.  It's hard to accelerate growth, product innovationemployee experience, and customer satisfaction simultaneously, but that's what Kronos has done - by design.

As is the case with the development of our technology, we continually assess and refine our customer service strategy.  On the customer satisfaction front, we've recently received significant recognition.  For the 18th consecutive year, Kronos was awarded the Omega Northface award for excellent customer support.  In addition, our vice president of global customer success, Jennifer Dearman, was recognized on the Mindtouch annual list of the Top 100 Customer Success Strategists.

Recently, I sat down with Jennifer and vice president of global professional services Kristina Lengyel to talk about what it takes to meet and exceed customer expectations while delivering sophisticated technology solutions.  As Kristina said during our conversation, "Customers are purchasing an experience"; i.e. our job is just starting when we implement the products.  Especially since we've moved to software as a service as our primary model, our customers expect that we'll lead them to better results in their organizations while alleviating them of the burden of managing that software.

We talked about how Kristina and Jennifer have worked hard to collaborate across Kronos in order to develop trusted relationships with our clients that accelerate their realization of value from the investments they make in Kronos.  Knocking down organizational siloes is never easy, but these two have led the way on many fronts.

You can learn a lot more about what it takes to exceed at customer satisfaction by listening in our our conversation below.

 

 

 

 

 

mall shopperOur  Holiday 2013: Top Trends to Watch survey findings add to the growing industry evidence that shoppers will make purchasing decisions leveraging multiple channels this season. In fact, 66 percent of Americans said that they will order online and ship to home or offices - and 25 percent noted that they will order online and pick up at stores.

The survey further reveals that it will take an average of 2.2 negative shopping experiences for Americans to stop purchasing from a retail brand – across any channel. More than two-thirds of Americans (68 percent) agree that a negative shopping experience within a single channel negatively impacts their perception across all shopping channels including physical stores, online, mobile, phone centers, and catalog.

In the wake of the controversy in the US about Thanksgiving Day openings, it's also interesting to reflect on these data points from the survey:

Those employee interactions still matter very much to driving top line revenue.  It will be interesting to see how well retailers are able to balance revenues vs. employee morale as the trend to staying open on holidays continues.

 

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I've had the pleasure of meeting with a few hundred Kronos customers over the past week in New York City, Milwaukee, and Columbus (Ohio). Annually, we host about 25 free one-day conferences around the US to provide our customers with an opportunity to learn, network, and give us their feedback. This is in addition to our annual customer conference - a three-day extravaganza that many customers have a hard time acquiring budget to attend. As a Kronite (yes, that's what we call ourselves) who spends much of my time trying to figure out how to educate customers about what we have to offer, it's a great opportunity to have conversations with people whose day jobs depend on us delivering a great experience.

The central conundrum of marketing is that too much communication turns people off, yet despite the tsunami of information we send to our customers, many are still unaware of our ability to help them in meaningful ways. We email, tweet, Facebook, YouTube, and enable our sales and service folks to tell our stories. And still those stories don't reach everybody who'd like to hear them. At these conferences, though, we welcome a diverse set of customers who are hungry to learn what they don't know and take it back to their organizations.

I'm part of a great team who do excellent work helping to tell the Kronos story through all the one-to-many channels mentioned above. But there will never be a substitute to experiencing those "aha" moments in person.

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