Touchpoints - Driving Customer Engagement
Driving Better Results Through The Employee Experience
It’s 5:30pm as Gary shuts down his computer monitor and reaches to turn off his desk lamp. He’s feeling great about the progress he’s made over the last two months in getting acclimated to his new responsibilities. Keys in hand, he makes his way toward the lobby when he’s startled by a loud “thud”! Looking to his left he notices Angela sitting down after dropping two binders and a three inch stack of loose papers on her desk. Gary starts to ask her if everything is OK but, before the words come out of his mouth, Angela glances up with a look of frustration. He can tell that everything is definitely not OK.
Angela was hired as a Customer Service Manager one week before Gary. “Ever since I started with this company,” she says, “ it’s been a major challenge trying to gather the information that I need. I do not understand what is so difficult about keeping our records organized so people can actually find what they’re looking for.” She sighs heavily realizing that it’s going to be another late night. “It just seems like it’s been one challenge after another. You must be coming along with your new role since you’re leaving on time.”, she says. “Yeah, things are falling into place,” Gary says. “But I’m a bit late in leaving.” Angela glances at her watch and her expression changes to panic. It’s later than she thought and she realizes she’ll never make it across town to pick-up her child on time.
If you’ve ever been in either Gary’s or Angela’s shoes, you know the impact that a positive or negative employment experience can have on your outlook and the quality of your work. This is especially true when it comes to managing your customer’s experience.
The Customer Experience / The Employment Experience
Most businesses want to create an incredible customer experience because that’s what leads to engagement, loyalty, repeat purchases and growth. The customer experience takes both the product and the delivery of that product into account. It’s what customers come to expect when interfacing with the brand. It’s their brand promise.
Take Starbucks, Apple and Amazon for example. Strong brands like these are very careful to understand the needs or desires of their customer and then create the right product or system that will fill those needs. A customer pays for the product and trusts that it will function as expected. They also know what to expect when it comes to the purchasing experience.
These companies understand the importance of driving a perception of quality and value in their service delivery. It’s the delivery part of the transaction that keeps people coming back for more. It’s no different with your employee population.
Beyond an Employee Value Proposition
An Employee Value Proposition (EVP) is the set of “products” that employees are purchasing with their knowledge, skills, experience, effort and time. Compensation, health benefits and affiliation are a few examples. Traditionally this has been the core offering of the company. It’s everything that an employee receives (the product) in exchange for their work (the purchase).
An Employee Experience Promise is a collective view of the individual experiences that an employee has while working for the employer. In contrast to the EVP, this is the delivery experience, a collection of touch points that employees experience within the organization. It’s the perception of the day-to-day activities, processes, challenges and accomplishments. If managed strategically, they can dramatically increase both engagement and the quality of results.
Here are a few questions to consider related to your Employee Experience Promise:
- What are the core touch points that your employees have with your organization? (For example: Talent acquisition, on-boarding, use of computer systems, training and development, accessing the information required to do their job, leadership meetings, physical environment, etc.)
- For each touch point, what are the actions that an employee must take? What do they need to be able to accomplish?
- What is the employee’s perspective on that touch point? Do things work smoothly? Does it strengthen or weaken their feelings about their role or the organization? Is it a source of frustration? Or is it a neutral element? This is where feedback directly from employees is beneficial.
- What are the contributing factors that influence their feeling or perspective?
- What changes can be made to improve either the ability to complete the action or their perspective on it?
- What other insights can be gathered for that touch point that can enhance the business function as a whole?
- How does that particular touch point build on or support your purpose, brand or culture?
If you want to build engagement within your team, this needs to become a core focus. It’s all about repeatedly affirming their decision to join the organization. When their work experience is positive, meaningful or rewarding, that decision is affirmed. When they run into continual challenges or frustrating experiences, it’s not. To get back to our earlier example, if you were continually frustrated with the performance of your iPhone, you would be less inclined to purchase the next version when it hit the market.
There is a strong correlation between the customer experience and the employee experience. If you want your customer experience to improve, make sure that your employees are in the frame of mind to deliver it.
When customers have a positive purchasing experience, they come back for more. When employees see that steps are being taken to improve their work experience, they give more. In both cases, an autopilot approach does not work. This needs to become part of your leadership team’s list of core objectives. You want to improve your customer experience and reduce turnover? Improve your employee experience.
You, as a leader, have a great opportunity to shape your employees’ work experience. Proactively identifying and removing obstacles to successful performance allows you to positively influence their perceptions. Allowing problems or frustrations to continue degrades the experience and increases the likelihood of turnover.
Still questioning the Return-on-Investment? Check-out Jacob Morgan’s Harvard Business Review article
as he states that companies that "invest most heavily in employee experience were included 28 times as often among Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies, 11.5 times as often in GlassDoor's Best Places to Work, 2.1 times as often in Forbes's list of the World's Most Innovative Companies, 4.4 times as often in LinkedIn's list of North America's Most In-Demand Employers, and twice as often in the American Customer Satisfaction Index." Even more, "experiential organizations had more than four times the average profit and more than two times the average revenue. They were also almost 25% smaller, which suggests higher levels of productivity and innovation."
When it comes to hiring, engaging and retaining high quality talent, is your Employee Experience Promise a competitive advantage? Let’s prepare to win. Contact HR Strategies Now.
Brian Wallace • July 12, 2021
From Theory to Execution - Building a Culture That Demands Leadership If leadership excellence isn’t about knowledge, then what is it about? It’s about building an environment where leadership is required, visible, and unavoidable. Most organizations never get there. Here’s how the ones that do think differently. Step 1: Define Leadership in Behavioral Terms “Be a better leader” is meaningless. Instead, define leadership like this: “Addresses performance issues within 48 hours” “Delegates decisions with clear ownership and authority” “Drives clarity by aligning team priorities weekly” If you can’t see it, you can’t manage it. Step 2: Make Leadership Measurable What gets measured gets managed. Ask: Are decisions being pushed down or pulled up? Are leaders developing successors or creating dependency? Is accountability consistent across teams? Are new ideas being generated? If leadership isn’t measured, it becomes subjective - and subjective standards don’t scale. Step 3: Align Consequences with Expectations This is where most organizations fail. They say leadership matters, but they tolerate: avoidance of difficult conversations inconsistent accountability leaders who produce results but damage culture siloed and self-optimizing behavior You can’t have leadership excellence without consequences for non-leadership behavior . Step 4: Build Leadership into the Operating System Leadership isn’t a program. It’s how the business runs. It shows up in: how meetings are conducted how decisions are made how performance is reviewed how feedback is delivered If leadership only shows up in training sessions, it won’t stick. Step 5: Create Cultural Pressure for Leadership The strongest cultures don’t rely on top-down enforcement. They create peer-level expectations. Leaders hold each other accountable, teams expect clarity and ownership, and underperformance is addressed quickly and directly Leadership becomes the norm, rather than the exception. The Payoff When leadership becomes part of the system, execution speeds up, decision-making improves, teams take ownership, and senior leaders get out of the weeds. And the organization finally operates at the level its strategy demands. Final Thought Most companies are trying to teach leadership. The best companies build environments where leadership is the only way to succeed . That’s the shift. And once it happens, everything else gets easier.
Let’s address the uncomfortable truth: Most leaders already know what they should be doing. They just don’t do it consistently. Not because they’re incapable - but because something is working against them. What’s Really Holding Leaders Back? It’s not a lack of awareness. It’s a combination of three forces that quietly shape behavior: 1. Success Has Trained Them to Stay the Same Leaders are promoted because they deliver results. So they double down on what got them there: solving problems themselves moving quickly by making decisions solo stepping in when things go sideways The problem? Those behaviors don’t scale. But letting go of them feels risky. So they don’t. 2. Short-Term Pressure Overrides Long-Term Discipline In theory, leaders know they should: coach instead of direct develop instead of fix empower instead of control But in reality? Deadlines hit. Clients escalate. Revenue matters. So they revert to speed and control because it’s faster right now. And just like that, long-term leadership development loses to short-term execution pressure. 3. The Organization Quietly Rewards the Wrong Behavior Watch closely and you’ll see it - the leader who “jumps in and saves the day” gets praised. Or the leader who builds a self-sufficient team gets overlooked. Or perhaps the leader who avoids conflict keeps the peace and avoids backlash. Organizations say they want leadership excellence. But their reward systems often reinforce the opposite. Why This Matters More Than You Think When leaders don’t change: their teams don’t grow decision-making stays centralized innovation slows burnout increases at the top And eventually, the business hits a ceiling that no strategy can fix. The Real Work of Leadership Development If you want leaders to change, you have to change the environment around them. That means: redefining what “good leadership” looks like aligning incentives with the behaviors you want creating consequences for avoiding leadership responsibilities Because people don’t rise to expectations. They rise to what the system reinforces .
Most companies don’t lack leadership knowledge—they lack execution. Discover why leadership fails and what it takes to turn insight into results.
