Wanting to offer an excellent customer experience? First you must offer an excellent employee experience…

If you haven’t got your hands on KPMG Nunwood’s latest analysis of customer experience in 2015 then you need to. You can find it here http://www.nunwood.com/customer-experience-excellence-centre/resources/national-ceec-analysis/

There is real insight into companies that are using Customer Experience as a strategy to drive revenues, profits, loyalty and recommendations. The top 100, as measured by Nunwood, achieved double the revenue growth of the FTSE 100!

Whilst their insights are measured against their Six Pillar methodology, what is clear is that the majority of the organisations put a great emphasis on creating the right culture and displaying the right behaviours in their employees. This means the interactions that customers have either directly with individuals or via digital channels (designed by individuals who understand the importance of an excellent customer experience) are all focused and aligned to the customer experience strategy, which in turn is aligned with the expectations that the brand promises.

Of the top 4 in the survey First Direct (#2), John Lewis (#3) and Richer Sounds (#4) all place a great deal of importance on their clearly understood and articulated principles being demonstrated to their customers via their interaction with employees. In other words they have all invested significantly in training to ensure the correct behaviours are exhibited consistently with each and every customer interaction. As you read through the report it is evident that there is a huge focus on personalising the service and “re-humanising” the experience.

Any learning and development program that supports this customer experience strategy is therefore vitally important. However, what any training program must not be is just an academic classroom exercise. It needs to really focus on changing the daily behaviours of the frontline employees to match the brand expectation and needs to be coached continually by the management team. That is what we focus on ABCG. Sure you may introduce ideas in the classroom, but you need a blended approach to learning and development to ensure capability and behaviour is engrained. If you want to offer an excellent customer experience you first need to offer an excellent employee experience. Training and development is at the heart of that employee experience. No matter what industry you’re in it’s always about the people!

It’s about how your customers feel about the interaction they have with your company. Frighteningly, the report explains that according to Gartner, in 2020 85% of your customers interaction which will be digital. Therefore it’s really important that we get the 85% designed correctly now and use the remaining 15% of human interaction to really wow the customer.

There is enough evidence around now to suggest that focusing on CX delivers sustainable and demonstrable business results. We believe (and can prove) it’s a great business decision to invest in developing the CX capability and behaviours of your employees. We can help you achieve this. As we keep saying to ourselves at ABCG, it’s really unusual to find hardened commercial people who are fanatical about training and behavioural change. We don’t have this fanaticism because it’s nice, we have it because it helps businesses to grow profitably and consistently. As I say it’s a hard-nosed business decision.

Please do feel free to contact me to discuss this further.
Carl Davies – Business Development Director carl@abcg.co.uk or +44 (0)7973 217110