How Companies with High-Trust Cultures Deliver Stronger Results
A strong company is built by securing the trust of its employees. If this trust is lost, individual companies may weaken and employee engagement may falter. Employees no longer trickle in from regional offices on a yearly basis in successful ventures. If the company goal is to improve employee morale and build a solid customer base, practicing continual data-driven listening strategies is essential.
“Employees hold a vast amount of knowledge when it comes to how customers react to products and services,” said Thomas Ewen, VP of Automotive Research Europe for MaritzCX, an enterprise customer experience management company. “At the same time, employees are often the best and most critical customers of their company’s product or service.”
Employee Feedback Goes Nowhere in Isolation
Employee feedback is key. However, when a company creates an atmosphere where departments or divisions constantly compete for funding or attention, it isolates the individual employee within their own group. If a company encourages a divisive attitude, the average employee perceives that they have little power or control over their career path.
On the other hand, when only one department gets praise and encouragement in the old model of dissension, that leaves a rather narrow band of employees who are happy and functioning well in their positions. Over time, few companies will survive in this environment, and even fewer will thrive. Providing continuous feedback to all employees increases efficiencies and overall effectiveness of an organization.
And inherently, incorporating this type of cooperation among all departments is necessary to identify employee concerns and track trends. The quicker a company responds to an individual employee’s concerns, the faster their customer engagement improves related to that feedback and data loop.
A journey management platform is one way organizations provide this type of ‘in-the-moment’ continuous experience where employees can anonymously send information up the chain of command or to a trusted department member. According to Gartner, managers need to build a deep understanding of their direct reports to better perceive when they may be more receptive to feedback or need it most.
Operationalizing an employee journey and providing a personalized experience gives added support to the employee who is looking for a way to respond to organizational concerns; a way to make the organization run better and more effectively, ultimately creating an employee buy-in when their feedback matters to the employers they work for.
Positive Rewards Encourage Employees to Improve Customer Loyalty
When feedback is sought and shared among departments, every customer experience is also affected. Everyone wins because employees feel valued. A valued employee acts like a confident ambassador for their business and they pass that trust on with every customer engagement.
Are competing departments prone or likely to share feedback received from their individual workers? Of course not! Every day, team leaders hear valuable information their company could put to good use. While some team leaders may keep such information to themselves in the hopes of benefiting their own team, companies cannot practice good customer care in that manner. The ability to measure employee satisfaction in each role, in each department and in general within the company is one of the metrics the JourneyLabs Platform provides. Incorporating measurements like the Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) is one way to foster employee engagement.
Valued Employees Improve Customer Retention
As companies practice a strategy of gathering employee feedback through multiple data sources, employees are able to sense the value their company places on their opinions. In fact, research shows that when organizations improve employee experience (EX), customer experience (CX) also improves. Therefore, customer retention depends on employee retention levels.
When a broad spectrum of company personnel give feedback and the company takes direct and positive action related to that feedback, employees begin to trust company leadership.
Once established, loyalty follows trust. Build a company full of steadfast employees who believe in the mission and watch the effect trickle down to create widespread customer loyalty. Any person who trusts their company and is faithful to its brand is part of the ultimate sales force; regardless of their assigned role within the business, that person spreads the word to everyone they meet.
A positive customer experience is every company’s goal. Customer retention is directly correlated to employee loyalty. Loyalty is earned by listening to all forms of employee feedback, all the time and yielding immediate and encouraging responses. Ewen may have said it best, “Engaging with employees, listening and incorporating their feedback will help companies realize improved employee retention, increased productivity, happier employees who willingly promote the business, improve the customer journey and eventually, greater profits and other positive business outcomes.”
Dawn Raquel Jensen is Head of Creative Marketing at JourneyLabs. A Florida native, Dawn is a graduate of the University of Central Florida (UCF) and Defense Information School (DINFOS). She is a social business, digital media and marketing strategist for start-ups and first stage businesses, and has been known to travel some distance for good BBQ and iced tea. For more information about JourneyLabs or to set up a demo of the JourneyLabs platform, email us: info@journeylabs.io.
Company
JourneyLabs helps organizations that deliver value through high-touch, proprietary products and services to better personalize, automate and scale their delivery at a reduced cost coupled with improved outcomes.
Organizations can express processes as “Journeys” on the JourneyLabs Platform to minimize gaps in engagement, increase personalization and improve situational responsiveness for their clientele.
The proprietary cloud and mobile platform optimizes enhanced information collection to enable custom, responsive action as well as long-term relationship analytics.
The JourneyLabs team is over 30 people strong across two continents. JourneyLabs’s partners build and offer internal and external industry solutions in healthcare, the workplace, public safety, non-profit entities and IT. Current partner projects include applications in behavioral health, orthopaedics, sales process control, military veteran transitions, patient self-advocacy, education, respiratory, employee “hire-to-retire” management, public safety and others.
Originally published at insights.journeylabs.io on January 29, 2019.