Chapter 6

It Takes Two to Be Engaged

In sum, the various Level II techniques described so far are essential for converting the typical event-based, rear-view–looking, data-driven customer focus process into a more ongoing relationship-based, real-time, value-driven process. Things like touch point surveys, interviews, focus groups, on-site assessments, customer advisory boards, joint project teams, and job rotations are vital for identifying ways to make the relationship more valuable to both sides.

However, there are some drawbacks or challenges supplier companies often face as they progress to and through Level II. These include:

• The increased frequency and depth of Level II actions require more people resources than most companies have formally dedicated to their customer focus initiative.

• Level II touch point techniques require new skills for the suppliers’ personnel and oftentimes require new skills for the customers’ personnel.
• The suppliers’ improved connections with their customers often reveals weak connections inside the supplier organization.
• The supplier organization is likely still defining, organizing, and managing itself around its products—not around the customer, so there’s no aligned sense of customer-centric goals and urgency.
• There are still internal silos in the supplier organization that dilute or prevent an end-to-end mindset of value creation.
• Level II activities take continuous prioritizing and tenacity to develop the more complete understanding that goes beyond the sales transaction and beyond the one or two primary owners of that relationship.

The last four challenges above are all the result of a culture that hasn’t yet made the adjustments it needs to really excel at its customer focus. We will be addressing these challenges in much detail later. For now, let’s look more closely at the first two challenges mentioned above—insufficient resources and the lack of or need for new skills.

Throughout the preceding discussion on touch point techniques, we stressed one important qualification that’s worth repeating: Being effective at Level II requires much more than the involvement of your customer service or support staff, and it requires much more than the typical sales or account management personnel can achieve. Companies that excel in providing a consistently superior customer experience share at least one common practice: Various employees, not just those with direct customer-facing jobs, spend time interacting with customers. The more people involved in a supplier’s customer focus, the more successful it can be, and the more likely it is that a genuine customer-centric culture will begin taking shape. There are two keys to enabling an effective Level II approach and eventual progress into Level III. One is to create a clear expectation for (and consistent awareness of) everyone’s role in the customer focus efforts. The other is to give people the skills, tools, and support they need to successfully fulfill those expectations and roles. Let’s look at each of these.

Customer Focus Cannot Be a Department or Title

Like it or not, your peoples’ most common and instinctive reaction to the company’s customer focus is that it’s someone else’s job. One reason for that reaction is something we discussed back in Chapter 2. The fanfare and hoopla that accompanies many customer focus efforts effectively makes it something new, something big and special . . . and unfortunately, something extra! People generally believe they already know what their job is, and they generally feel they already have more than enough to do. Consequently, they are quick to assume (hope) that this new initiative surely must be someone else’s job.

Another reason is that one of the first things that a company wanting to kick-start or restart their customer focus does is to create a department and/or position that reinforces the notion that it’s someone else’s job. The minute you anoint someone as your chief customer officer, CE director, customer advocate—or any number of similar titles or roles—you’ve effectively shifted the responsibility from everyone to someone. One other reason for this lack of shared ownership is most companies don’t take the time and care needed to help everyone understand that the customer’s experience with a supplier company is influenced by all jobs—not just customer-facing jobs.

Left to their own volition, most people will move quickly to put distance between their role and any customer focus ownership and responsibility. Even people who are in customer-facing roles will instinctively try to define their responsibility and accountability for it as narrowly as possible. For example, when we are helping a company analyze and act on its customer survey results, we like to gauge the level of ownership for those results beforehand. One effective way to do this is to send a copy of your CSM survey to all (or a sampling of) your employees, and ask them to complete it in the way they believe the customer would complete it. In other words, if they were the customers, how would they rate the supplier company? Then we like to segment the results by business unit, or product line, or by region, or by functional area/department.

When we do this, we usually find similar results. One is that employees and managers (referred to collectively as “employees” from here on) often have a view of the customer’s perception that is much more positive or favorable than the customer’s actual view. A significant number of employees (though rarely all of them) think their company is much better at satisfying customers than it really is. The other result we consistently find is that where employees believe customer perceptions are negative, or could be improved, they typically believe the problem is due to some other department, not their department. They are quick to own responsibility for creating a favorable impression, but equally quick to disown any responsibility for negative impressions. Hard to imagine? Try it for yourself, and see what you get.

A shared sense of ownership is critical for an effective customer focus because without it, the important work to be done will fall on the shoulders of the few, instead of being shared by many. Without it, creating, deepening, maintaining, and leveraging the touch point relationships and results discussed earlier will not be possible. Without it, making the process improvements needed for a successful Level II focus, and building the cultural enablers needed at Level III, will not be possible. Key to this shared ownership is, first, ensuring clear expectations have been set; second, creating and enabling opportunities for engagement at all levels and functions; and third, ensuring there’s consistent awareness of those expectations and opportunities.

Expect Everyone to Play a Role

Clear expectations begin with employees understanding the role customers play in their supplier company’s world and the fact that the company exists, for no other reason, but to be a successful business by creating value for its customers. Each employee’s individual job, in turn, plays a functional role in helping the company meet its customers’ needs. These jobs don’t exist for the sake of keeping them employed, or for the sake of making them happy, or for the sake of the jobs themselves. Their jobs exist to help the company successfully deliver customer value. Figure 6.1 plainly and simply illustrates that reality. How to convey it to employees in a clear and meaningful way will be the topic for later chapters.

Figure 6.1 Customers don’t exist so employees can have jobs; Employees’ jobs exist so customers can receive value.

In this chapter, our goal is to help you understand that the customer focus will not succeed without a strong commitment to engaging employees throughout the organization around that focus.

As we’ve noted several times during our Level II discussions, enterprise value is created when customer personnel and supplier personnel engage each other at the various touch points or intersections of their respective companies. (See Figure 6.2.)

Figure 6.2 When Customer–Supplier Employees Intersect

The key is to make sure all the employees and managers within the supplier circle see their roles as a critical part of enabling those who are working at the intersection. All jobs, not just the jobs in the intersection, play a role in identifying and/or delivering customer value. We get considerable pushback from naysayers who want to argue that every company has jobs that simply do not impact the customer’s experience. To that we say: Find those jobs and get rid of them! Every job in a supplier organization either has a direct customer-facing role or, directly supports a job somewhere in the organization that is customer facing. Every job either directly or indirectly impacts the customer. If a job truly does neither, then we ask why it is on the payroll at all. If it’s not directly or indirectly impacting the customer, the job should be eliminated, automated, or outsourced. Once we describe this to companies, it’s interesting to see how eager they are to identify the customer connection to the jobs in their organizations.

Create Roles for Everyone to Play

The challenge some companies encounter is that while they want everyone to own the customer focus, they don’t know how to create ways for everyone to engage in it. Our earlier touch point–teaming discussion showed a number of opportunities for supplier personnel to engage customer personnel. Below are some other examples, and in our process improvement (Step #6) and joint workout (Step #7) discussions we’ll show still other opportunities companies have to get many—if not all—employees engaged in and committed to their customer focus.

Numerous examples can be found at Ritz-Carlton. The hotel chain printed its 12 “Service Values” on a laminated card carried by every employee. (See the sidebar on the Ritz-Carlton Service Values.) And while the company uses the term “service values” to define them, they are just as much the principles of engagement for their employees. Each day, employees of each hotel assemble for the daily “line-up.” The line-up covers the key operational issues or priorities for the day and includes the “wow story” of the day, which is shared in Ritz-Carlton facilities in 21 countries. The wow story is an individual employee’s example of how they wowed a customer, and how that story linked to one of the service values. As part of their customer focus, each employee is permitted to spend up to $2,000 and managers can spend up to $5,000 to avoid losing a guest.1

One documented example involved a family arriving at the Ritz-Carlton in Bali to discover the special milk and eggs they were transporting for their child, who had severe food allergies, had spoiled. The head chef of the hotel scoured the surrounding area for a store that carried the specialty food items, but was unsuccessful. He ultimately remembered a specialty store in Singapore, called to ensure they carried the special milk and eggs, and had his mother-in-law buy the items, jump on an airplane with them, and bring them to Bali for the family. Ritz-Carlton’s “never lose a guest” principle requires setting clear expectations for their people (the 12 values), training them on how to implement those principles, and empowering them to make decisions (i.e. engage customers) within those principles.2

Commerce Bank, headquartered in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, has a similar approach to engaging their employees around their customer focus with their Wow Team. Branches try to “out wow” each other and each year the president recognizes top performers at the company-wide Wow Awards. Their efforts include a Wow Patrol and mystery shoppers who visit each branch at least weekly to catch employees engaging the customer in ways that differentiate their bank. Branches receive ratings for the specific steps employees take to engage customers right down to the handshake and verbal greeting extended to each visitor. Without their customer-focused culture and employees who are hired, trained, and rewarded to engage and wow customers, Commerce believes it would quickly become just another bank. They actually have something called a “Kill a Stupid Rule” program. If an employee identifies a rule that prevents them from wowing customers, the bank pays them $50. Imagine that . . . encouraging—even rewarding—employees for finding rules that need abolished. Wow!3

Training is one area that surprises us as to how underutilized it is as an employee–customer engagement vehicle. At Motorola University, for example, 45 percent of the training participants are not Motorola personnel, but are customers and suppliers who are invited to attend as a way to build their skills and knowledge and to further reinforce a mutually loyal relationship. Similarly, General Electric’s (GE) Crotonville, New York, training and development center provides as much training to customers and key suppliers as it does to GE personnel.4 Whirlpool offers customers, among other participants, management and technical training. A division of Greyhound that serves the airlines industry provides customers with safety and flight service training. And Marriott Corporation provides specialized training to selected customers.5

The value and impact of these training approaches cannot be overstated. They can present unique and powerful supplier opportunities for your organization in several ways:

• You have direct dialogues with and gain unique insights from your customers.
• You further raise their comfort with, and trust and confidence in, your personnel.
• You engage them in forward-looking conversations about industry trends.
• You reinforce the sense of how important they are to you.
• You indirectly showcase your own expertise or offerings.
• You develop new personal connections that can be further leveraged over time.

One other area that is not exploited nearly enough is taking plant tours or site visits of your customers’ facilities or operations. Usually, when a supplier does this, it’s done at the management level, or involves a narrow slice of supplier personnel such as those involved in sales, quality assurance, or product development. These kinds of visits, however, are invaluable opportunities to expose all of your company’s personnel—customer facing or not—to your customer’s business. I have yet to see a customer balk at the idea of having an administrative, front-line, or back office employee join a tour of their facility. It’s always the supplier that either doesn’t consider the possibilities, or doesn’t want to “impose” on the customer. That’s a weak answer in our view. For every reason you think you can’t or shouldn’t do this, there are probably three reasons why you should. This isn’t something you do all at once or make a big deal of. You work at it steadily, and quietly, over time. For every customer tour or site visit you make, ensure just one (at a minimum) non–customer-facing employee is part of the touring group. How hard can that be? Over time, you’ll be able to expose a significant number of your employees to the customer who wouldn’t have otherwise ever seen or had a chance to appreciate the reason for your company existing. If you have any doubt about the impact this can have on your employees—try it . . . just once . . . and see for yourself.

One final engagement example we want to mention and have successfully introduced to many companies is to designate someone in each department, functional area, business unit, or other appropriate entity as the customer focus point person. Organizations call them by various names: customer focus liaisons, customer focus coordinators, customer experience advocates, customer experience champions, or something similar. Their specific customer focus responsibilities will vary from one company to another, but generally consist of the following more common ones:

• Serve as an advocate and source of the most up-to-date information about the customer focus in general.
• Act as a conduit that ensures two-way communications between the colleagues in their respective department or work area and the customer focus leaders, steering team, or senior leadership.
• Test ideas and act as a sounding board for the customer focus team that considers and plans the implementation steps of the journey.
• Coordinate or spearhead the implementation of any specific steps or projects that involve or impact their respective department or work area.
• Serve as the touch point owner who coordinates any customer focus activity, including the joint projects we’ll discuss later, for a given touch point, process, or function.

These assignments are not full-time responsibilities but are performed as part of the individual’s normal job responsibilities. The more people involved, the smaller the demand on their time. There is, however, an extra level of work for these people to do—even if only minor effort is involved. Given that added effort, one particularly effective approach is to assign these liaison roles to high-potential (Hi-Po) performers or to individuals who are being groomed for future management roles or are participating in what some companies refer to as their leadership development program (LDP). People in Hi-Po or LDP programs are typically willing to stretch their responsibilities, tend to enjoy high-visibility assignments, are generally interested in progressive leadership and best practices, and are usually looking for ways to raise their level of contribution to the organization. They are oftentimes a natural fit for customer focus special assignments or informal leadership roles.

While it is vital to set clear expectations about who owns the customer focus and who is expected to engage around that focus (i.e., everyone!), equally important is ensuring everyone is consistently and continually kept aware of those expectations.

Maintaining Awareness of Expectations and Opportunities

A critical misstep by many companies is underestimating what it takes for employees to really embrace and execute on initiatives that come down from above. Just because the company’s senior leaders issue a charge or declare their commitment to something, that doesn’t mean the rest of the organization will rally around, embrace, and implement it. Nothing could be further from reality. If anything, the opposite is just as likely to happen—anything ranging from giving the project lip service support, to benign neglect, to outright resistance. Over the years we have seen literally hundreds of initiatives, campaigns, and programs that are born at the executive level but die at the entry level. One of the key reasons is the grassroots implementers—the managers and employees who must operationalize the executive edict—have not been engaged at the outset and throughout the implementation.

Let’s look at a recent example of a company that was in year five of its customer focus initiative, but was puzzled by the mixed results. First, this company had been conducting customer satisfaction surveys and employee satisfaction surveys for five years. To its credit, the company knew there was a linkage between satisfied employees and satisfied customers and wanted to track, evaluate, and improve its internal and external activities accordingly. For the five-year period, the company’s employee satisfaction ratings continually improved to a five-year peak of 89 percent satisfaction—an enviable score by any standard. However, during that same five-year period, their customer satisfaction scores were relatively flat. Any gains in certain satisfaction factors, customer segments, or parts of the business were offset by lower ratings in a different set of satisfaction factors, segments, or other parts of the business. To further aggravate its senior leaders, the company’s economic growth indicators during the five-year period were clearly trending down. Not a financial disaster by any means, but very much an unexpected downward trend that raised questions, if not concerns.

We were asked to help the company evaluate and improve its situation. Among the first things we did was shift its focus from employee satisfaction to employee engagement. We have rarely seen a company in which the employees—in general—don’t feel they are overworked or underpaid. There is always going to be some segment of employees, in some segment of the company, who are unhappy about some aspect of their employment. We’re not suggesting that employee happiness isn’t important, but we are saying it’s not sufficient. If you strive for satisfied or happy employees, that may or may not improve your performance in the customer marketplace. But if you strive for employees who are engaged—specifically around the customer’s experience—that will most likely impact your marketplace performance.

We replaced the company’s 40-question employee satisfaction survey with a 15-question employee–customer experience engagement survey. Those 15 questions were rolled up to form a three-factor engagement composite score in each of the following three factors:

The resulting composite engagement score was as instructive as it was irritating. (See Figure 6.3.)

Figure 6.3 Composite Score for Employee–Customer Experience Engagement

Simply put, more than three-fourths (36 percent + 41 percent = 77 percent) of this company’s employees didn’t understand, know their role in, or feel equipped to support the company’s CE strategy. They weren’t engaged. When an organization’s people are engaged with a particular effort, it means they are enlightened about, embrace, and are willing to execute it.

That kind of engagement is vital and is not going to happen without each manager and employee (1) understanding what type and level of engagement is expected of them; (2) being provided and shown how to take advantage of the various opportunities to be engaged; and (3) being continually reminded of those expectations and opportunities, as well as being reinforced for doing their part. More about reinforcing and reminding will be discussed in the “consequences” and “change” sections of the 10-Point Customer Focus Framework.

Before leaving this discussion of employee engagement, let’s look at a tool that can be quite effective at the early stages of a customer focus journey. It’s sometimes called a Customer Experience Readiness Survey, an Awareness Survey, or a Cultural Baseline Survey and is intended to accomplish the following objectives, among others:

• Assess how effectively communications are reaching or taking root in various levels and parts of the organization.
• Determine the organization’s current view of customer satisfaction.
• Gauge the level of importance or necessity people attribute to the customer focus.
• Assess whether people grasp how the customer focus benefits the business and/or them personally.
• Generally gauge the level of acceptance or resistance the company might expect or be experiencing.
• Establish a baseline measure that can be used to track, evaluate, and correct progress.

Sample Customer Experience Readiness Survey

Figure 6.4 is a very basic version of a customer experience readiness survey that is generic enough to apply to a broad range of industries and cultures. In practice, we would use a survey that is highly tailored to the particular organization’s unique culture, challenges, and objectives.

Figure 6.4 Sample Customer Experience Readiness Survey

Scan for printable copy

As mentioned in our strategy discussion, a company’s customer focus should raise the bar on what the supplier wants and tries to achieve. It will most likely raise the customers’ expectations of what more might be possible, and given the types of engagement we’ve been discussing, it will certainly raise the bar on the types of skills and capabilities the supplier needs to progress.

That’s why training and tools are considered a key element for a successful customer focus. You’ll have people engaging the customer who might not have done so historically. You’ll have customer-facing people getting involved in ways they haven’t yet been involved. And you’ll have everyone focused on understanding, embracing, and implementing a more customer-centric culture or mindset. This will require new skills for any number of people.

So here are some questions you’ll need to work through to ensure you are “tooled up” to execute your plan. Given your company’s customer focus:

• What are the top priorities or initiatives the company plans to pursue?
• What capabilities does the company need (broadly) to achieve those priorities?
• What training and tools do those who must implement these priorities need?

Over the years, we have come to see a recurring theme in the capabilities and skills companies need to implement their customer focus priorities. Listed in Figure 6.5 are six of the more common customer focus capabilities on which many companies concentrate. Also listed in Figure 6.5 are some representative, individual competencies or skills that often align with or enable those broader capabilities. The competencies or skills listed are not in any way meant to be exhaustive or absolute—they are offered as typical examples. There are many other individual competencies or skills that could apply to any given organization.

Figure 6.5 Company Capabilities and Employee Skills

Some of those individual skills are best learned on the job, where others can be taught in formal training settings. Figure 6.6 shows some of the specific training courses typically needed and used by supplier companies—many of which are provided both internally to managers and employees, and externally to selected customer personnel.

Figure 6.6 Training Courses Typically Needed and Used

The value of some of the courses shown in Figure 6.6 will become clearer when we talk about Process Orientation Step #7 of the framework. While all of these courses can play and have played an important role in equipping a company’s employees to execute their customer focus responsibilities, the Business Acumen or Fundamentals of Business course is of particular importance. It’s not so much a specific skill that employees use in their daily jobs, as much as it is an effective foundational course that helps them better appreciate the customer focus and put it in the proper context.

In essence, this foundation course is designed to provide employees, in fairly basic terms and examples, with four core teachings:

These basic business courses can also reinforce the fact that many different functions or departments impact the customer, and the customer, in turn, impacts employee earnings and opportunities. Such courses often include a nontechnical picture or diagram, along with explanations, depicting the company’s basic business model, which further helps employees visualize how they fit into the business. (See Figure 6.7 for a very basic business model example.)

Figure 6.7 The Basic Business Model

Obviously, training in and of itself doesn’t automatically translate directly into new or changed skills, performance, or behavior. It’s the practical application of that training to real work situations that we seek. And that’s where tools can play an important role. They can serve as practice aids or reference guides that help personnel remember or resort to what they learned in the training. Questionnaires for the on-site assessments or touch point interviews described earlier, dialogue and recovery scripts, sales playbooks, retention risk review guides, and other field guides and tools have been developed and used by many companies to support their people as they apply newly learned customer focus techniques to their jobs.

Another important category includes the more technology-based tools that support people in the execution of their customer focus responsibilities. Tech-tools such as customer relationship management (CRM) systems, customer analytics applications, price modeling tools, customer service web portals, customer service representative (CSR) agent stations, and the like can all play critical roles in your customer focus. The types and sophistication of these tools, technology-based or otherwise, vary widely and are beyond the scope of this book. But as one example (not technology-based), we have frequently used what we call the Customer Focus Compass as an effective field practice aid for customer-focused employees. It provides a model they can use to think through and follow-up on the implications of various customer focus problems or situations.

See Figure 6.8 for one version of the compass. When we train people how to use it, we typically provide them with several different customer experience scenarios and have them dissect the scenario using the compass.

Figure 6.8 Customer Focus Compass

For example, when confronted with a situation, customer insight, or observation, first look north or think about how the situation links upward to the broader customer focus or business strategy. Is it consistent with or conflicting with the company’s customer focus strategy or key principles? Will resolution of the issue advance the strategy, dilute it, or not impact it either way?

Then look west (or think backward) to what might have caused or created the situation or question. Is there an underlying policy, process, or practice—or the interpretation or implementation thereof—that might need to be evaluated, reaffirmed, or revised to ensure it’s still relevant, current, or effective?

Look east (or think ahead) about if or how other customers might be experiencing this particular situation. Is it isolated to this one customer, to a particular type of customers, or many types of customers? Does it concern one product or service, an entire product line, or all products? If a change were made to address the situation at hand, how might it impact others? What—if any—of those others should be conferred with before or while making the change?

Finally, look south (or below the surface) to see how we can extend the benefit of this learning or fix. How can we replicate it or further leverage it into other products, customer segments, divisions, or regions? How can we multiply or maximize the benefit or gain we get from it?

1 Hal Becker, “Check into the Ritz-Carlton for Good Customer Service Tips,” The Business Journals, April 22, 2008, http://www.bizjournals.com/louisville/stories/2008/04/28/smallb2.html.

2 C. Gallo, “How Ritz-Carlton Maintains its Mystique,” Businessweek.com, February 13, 2007, http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2007-02-13/how-ritz-carlton-maintains-its-mystiquebusinessweek-business-news-stock-market-and-financial-advice.

3 Chuck Salter, “Customer Service: Commerce Bank,” Fast Company 58 (May 2002): 80.

4 Ron Ashkenas et al., The Boundaryless Organization: Breaking the Chains of Organizational Structure, rev ed. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2002), 84.

5 Ron Ashkenas et al., The Boundaryless Organization: Breaking the Chains of Organizational Structure, (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995), 204.