Earn smiles to increase your Customer Experience/Employee Experience

I have been working in the interest of customers and live by delivering the best customer experience in my capacity.

As a leader, I understand that without the best-in-class employee experience, best-in-class customer experience CANNOT be delivered. And collectively both provide magical results!

Don’t agree with me? Ok, let’s take a look at the weeds of it to understand.

When you have happy employees that are fully aligned with the mission and vision of your brand, they become your brand’s Superheroes.

Yes! And I am not talking about delivering what the customers are expecting BUT they are going above and beyond to deliver the ‘WOW’ experience to the customers.

An HBR study in August 2019 found that each one-star improvement in a company’s Glassdoor rating corresponds to a 1.3-point out of 100 improvements in customer satisfaction scores — a statistically significant impact, which was more than twice as large in industries where employees interact closely and frequently with customers.

How Employee Experience Translate to customer satisfaction

In this era of competition, your employees are your biggest asset. Be in any industry whether service or product, your brand value in the marketplace is created mostly by your employees.

Like your frontline executives who deal with the customers at every touchpoint- this is the moment of truth where customers evaluate if a brand is really delivering what it promises!

Let’s take an example, suppose you receive an online delivery with a secure packaging before the said time and the company sends you a complimentary gift with a ‘Happy Birthday’ note (thanks to the database that prompted the customer’s birthday reminder)- would that not count as a ‘WOW’ experience?

Going above and beyond to deliver the unexpected — the ‘WOW’ factor- can happen only if you have happy employees bound with the goal of delivering happiness to the customers. Trust me, you cannot be a company that delivers the best CX without having a best-in-class Employee experience

Jeff Bezos said: “To deliver great customer expectations, the first step is to know the expectations and then deliver above and beyond customer expectations from an unusual way. This is the master’s way to deliver WOW experience.”

Hence to be a leader in Customer Experience, one needs to be Visionary, Strategic, Approachable, Innovative, decision-maker in the best interest of customers and employees both. You can’t be a company that delivers the best CX without having a very good EX happiness index in your organization.

In my opinion, traits for CX and EX are similar where basics need to be right. Empathy, embracing the diversity in culture, positive attitude and commitment to deliver smiles to your customers.

What can you do to increase your Customer Experience?

Let me share with you my real-life experience- We started a mission in our team to improve our C-Sat score from 3.2 to 4.5 in 1 quarter.

After hours of discussion, we curated a plan for this. We reviewed past success stories of great companies and their actions and got to know that every change begins from within and your mindset. We started some key initiatives

• Daily positive affirmation quotes to be shared in daily meetings (10 mins.) Yes, of course, we did it via zoom as most of us operate from different geographies.
• A weekly training that includes sharing the success stories from great companies and how they did breakthroughs
• We also invited CX Influencers to share their stories about what made them devote their lives to this field.

The answer we got was a game-changer for all of us. A collaborative focus on spreading smiles and great results were in front of us.

While we got success in our initial important huddle of change in mindset. Next huddle came about how we coordinate? How do we track these happiness scores in real-time and make course corrections?

This is where SurveySensum came in as a life savior for leaders like us. Employers could easily track team performance in real-time via a leader board. And see who is leading and who needs a little push.

SurveySensum is an experience management platform, helps in collecting customer feedback in real-time.

We asked our happy customers to share their smiley pictures with us and it overwhelmed us with joy. Understanding the pain points of unhappy customers and resolving queries in real-time helped us earn their smiley pictures as well.

This is what we aimed for and this entire initiative was appreciated by our customers and board of management.

By understanding customers and creating better collaboration within the team, we created Employee-centric and Client-centric culture in our organization.

Is it not this cool initiative?

If you would like to know more about SurveySensum or interested in knowing more about our Smiley initiative OR if you are planning something similar and need guidance. Feel free to reach out to me and I will be more than happy to help.

“We die to see smiles all day. In the current situation of COVID-19 when there is a high sadness index, take a pledge to share more happiness. You can start by smiling yourself and keeping a promise to keep that!”