Employee Ambassadorship

Michael W. Lowenstein

• Publisher: Business Expert Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781631578137
• eBook ISBN: 9781631576652
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

There have been a number of professional and academic studies, in multiple industries, linking employee attitudes and behaviors with the value customers perceive in their experiences. Through targeted research, and resultant training, communication, process, and reward and recognition programs, what we define as ambassadorship formalizes the direction in which employee engagement has been trending toward for years. Simply, the trend is optimizing employee commitment to the organization and its goals, to the company's unique value proposition, and to the customer. This is employee ambassadorship, a state beyond satisfaction and engagement where all employees are focused on, and tasked with, delivering customer value as part of their job description, irrespective of location, function or level. There is growing general agreement that both developing employee ambassadors and customer advocates should receive high priority and emphasis if an enterprise is going to be successful. What building ambassadorship does mandate, however, is that having employees focus on the customer will definitely drive more positive experiences and stronger loyalty behavior (for both stakeholder groups). Because antecedent approaches to employee engagement (through research and application) are principally about productivity and alignment, and offer an organization only modest insight about level or degree of customer-centricity, more connection between employee behavior and customer behavior builds focus, effectiveness, and profitability. That is what the content/scope of Employee Ambassadorship will help provide.

CHAPTER 1

The Evolving Role(s) and Needs of Employees … and How to Stay in Front of Them

Apart from customer loyalty, which is on the radar screen of just about every company, there is no other topic that concerns organizations more than employee retention, commitment, and productivity. Staff turnover is near 20-year highs for many companies. Two research firms, Walker Information and Hudson Institute, recently joined forces to conduct a nationwide employee loyalty study. Their results confirmed that staff loyalty and commitment are in short supply:

• Only 24 percent of employees consider themselves truly loyal, committed to their organization and its goals, and planning to stay at least two years.
• Thirty-three percent of employees were high risk, not committed, and not planning to stay.
• Thirty-nine percent were classified as trapped. They plan to stay, but are not committed to their organization.
• Among those who felt they worked for an ethical organization, 55 percent were truly loyal. For those who didn’t feel they worked for an ethical organization, the loyalty figure was 9 percent.

The 72 percent of employees identified as being at risk or trapped represent another key, yet less explored, concern for companies. The lack of employee commitment frequently translates to having poor personal experiences, and being out of alignment, with each other and with customers, in executing the company’s mission, goals, and strategic objectives and in appropriately representing the product or service value proposition. In other words, what they are doing on the job can be counterproductive and damaging, to themselves and others. Since the issues impacting customer loyalty and commitment to a supplier are often highly correlated with staff productivity and proaction, optimizing employee loyalty and commitment becomes doubly important.

Many companies don’t even realize the depth of their staff retention, continuity, and alignment problems. While at the senior management level, turnover may only be 4 to 5 percent, the real drain of talent is typically among those employees who are age 25 to 35 years and have been at the same firm for 3 to 10 years.

These staff members are often among the most productive and represent the highest long-term contribution potential for any company. They can also be among the most nonaligned with company vision and strategy, and noninvested in their commitment to customers. Yet, the vast majority of organizations don’t track the drivers of turnover, threats of defection, or misalignment among this important group.

This “silent” defection and misalignment is particularly prevalent in large, decentralized companies with 20 to 100 divisions, operating in multiple states and/or multiple continents. On a single division basis, the defection and misalignment numbers among staff age 25 to 35 years may not seem problematic. But when viewed across all divisions of a company, the churn, potential defection, and misalignment numbers in this age group are often alarmingly high.

Firms pay a big price for staff defection, or “shadow” defection, where personal performance and commitment levels are very low. For starters, when employees leave a company, it has often been found that customers are soon to follow. Recent customer defection studies have shown that roughly 70 percent of the reasons customers churn can be traced back to issues related to staff’s lack of commitment and turnover. And staff turnover often leads to more, and more widespread, staff turnover, spreading like an epidemic (see Figure 1.1). Even the departure of a single valuable employee can send “shock waves” through a company culture, leaving remaining staff demoralized and disillusioned. If there was a trend toward misalignment, high staff turnover, and/or low morale and disaffection, will only cause it to increase.

Figure 1.1 Defection note

Source: Internet.

Replacing the departed employee is expensive. Human resource executives estimate that when all direct and indirect factors are considered—the recruitment fees, discontinuity from defector’s lost leads and contacts, the new employee’s reduced productivity while learning the new job, and the time and energy co-workers spend guiding the newbie—replacement costs are estimated at approximately 150 percent, or more, of the departing person’s salary.

Misalignment, too, carries a high price tag, though it’s more challenging to isolate and estimate than the direct loss of an employee. A lack of alignment can be seen in places like the organization’s style and culture, staff communication, teamwork, and information flow, service to/focus on customers, level of training offered, productivity and efficiency, and management effectiveness.

Responsibilities and Opportunities in Customer Service: Behavioral Alignment Example

Research studies in multiple industries indicate that customer service representatives (CSRs) across the United States handle an average of 2,000 customer interactions each week. If CSRs are not aligned with the customer strategy, indeed are not directly involved with creating and executing the strategy as part of their own job experience, this can represent 2,000 opportunities to put customers at risk or lose them.

Placing the customer first, or completely focusing on customers—two of the clarion calls of customer centricity—have a hollow ring if these strategies aren’t drilled down and reduced to a point where CSRs’ daily efforts can have a positive impact on customer loyalty behavior. The reality is, however, that few organizations do this. Instead, they set unrealistic customer service productivity requirements or establish performance metrics and levels that are not based on customer input or need. Further, because customer service centers (aka customer contact centers, call centers, or interaction centers) haven’t, until recently, begun to be seen as profit generation centers, their vision and mission, as well as their operational construct, was seen in fairly myopic terms.

These centers of customer contact now represent the principal touch point with customers; and, beyond technology, the centers have the capability to generate and manage a continuous flow of customer information and to increase customer loyalty. Getting the most out of customer contact centers, indeed from employees in all customer-facing and non-customer-facing functions, will require change; and, in many companies, this means significant change.

For commitment and what we describe as ambassadorship to be optimized, one of the changes that companies will have to institute will be to start focusing on people. Tremendous investments have been made on technological innovations—interactive voice response (IVR) systems, call routing, multimedia integration, and the like—yet investment in people, and processes to support them, has been stagnant, lagging behind other efforts. To deliver on the promise technology offers in customer relationships, staff performance and experience have to be prioritized. People have to be shown what to do, given feedback about how they’re doing, and rewarded if they are doing well.

Meeting the objectives of a customer relationship management (CRM) or customer experience (CX) strategy means, for one thing, that targets and metrics set for CSRs must be balanced to incorporate productivity, quality of service delivered, and effectiveness of performance on behalf of customers. One of the most effective ways for accomplishing this, we have found, is through “customer-first” teams, in customer service and throughout the company.

Tom Peters has said that, in the future, “most work will be done by project teams. The ‘average’ team will consist of various people from various ‘organizations’ with various skills. Networks of bits and pieces of companies will come together to exploit a market opportunity.” Such can certainly be the case with customer loyalty, customer service, and customer recovery programs.

There are several advantages to networked, team-based structures as opposed to traditional hierarchies as they strive to create value and higher trust levels for customers. They include better, more quickly shared information, greater decision agility, faster response time, and greater, more proactive, and relationship-building customer contact, as well as:

• Flattened, matrix-based organizational structures for greater efficiency
• Minimizing nonvalue-added functional activities and better use of staff time and talent
• Assigning ownership of performance
• Greater opportunity for self-management and a wider scope of work in each job, with more (rotated) exposure to customers
• Linking performance objectives and individual and team performance to customer loyalty behavior
• More targeted employee training and skill development

A fitting example of how customer-first teams can impact customer loyalty and customer winback—and staff loyalty and performance as well—comes from Baptist Health Care in Pensacola, Florida. Several years ago, Baptist Health Care had patient service performance, which ranked them close to the bottom of all hospitals in national surveys. This situation also contributed to both declining patient populations and low staff morale.

Baptist Health Care executives were determined to turn this around. Quint Studer, then the hospital’s president, said, “We had to create the type of environment where people drive by two other hospitals to get here.” Baptist Health Care formed 10 cross functional employee teams to examine every aspect of value delivery to patients and their families. More than 150 hospital employees now participate as team members on these original teams. Each team has membership as diverse as corporate vice presidents and cafeteria workers. Additionally, Baptist has created ad hoc and ongoing teams to address areas such as customer winback. Up to 30 percent of Baptist Health Care employees serve on teams at any given time.

Today, Baptist Health Care’s service performance ranks among the very best in national customer surveys, its market share has significantly improved, staff morale is higher, and staff loss—and the money previously spent for recruiting as a result of turnover—has dramatically declined.

Baptist Health Care is now using their superior performance in patient care and services as a springboard for moving to an even higher plateau. As described by Pam Bilbrey, formerly Baptist Health Care’s senior vice president of Development: “We’re pushing ourselves to move past the passion of service excellence to the next stage: customer loyalty.” A testament to the success of Baptist Health Care is the organization’s consistent naming to a high position on Fortune magazine’s annual list of the 100 best companies to work for in America.

The array of cross functional customer-first team possibilities is limited only by an organization’s willingness to embrace the concept. Bottom line: Customer-first teams enhance loyalty and staff productivity. Baptist Health Care is an excellent example of the success of customer-first teams. Every company should want to emulate their achievements. We have more to say about Baptist Health Care in Chapter 5.

Companies are also going to have to do a better job of determining just how effective service groups are at creating perceived customer value and, ultimately, optimizing customer loyalty behavior.

Traditional employee satisfaction studies, just like customer satisfaction studies, are much more about measuring superficial attitudes and past events, keying largely on salaries and benefits, and the working environment, than they are about understanding emotional components of the job experience, how aligned staff are with customers and with fellow employees in delivering consistently superior experiences, how productive staff are on behalf of customers, and how well supported and directed they are in providing value.

For customer-facing groups like customer service to have the same type of contribution, alignment with goals, and leadership seen in organizations like Baptist Health Care, and for these groups to help realize the promise of customer centricity, the three words that need to be emphasized are training, involvement, and measurement.

A Quick “How-to” Primer for Getting to Staff Loyalty, Alignment, and Commitment Optimization

Having reviewed hundreds of traditional employee satisfaction and engagement surveys over the years, and carefully studying how the results have been interpreted and applied by companies, it’s clear that the vast majority of them are about as superficial and challenged to provide real direction to corporate and HR management as their customer satisfaction survey cousins.

Employee commitment study results are, as noted, often mirror images of what’s going on with customers. For example, one of our clients was known to have a highly ineffectual regional director. In that director’s region, both customer and staff defection were quite high. On the staff loyalty and alignment study for the client, regional employees rated teamwork and staff communication dramatically lower than for other regions, especially among frontline staff. Likewise, the customer loyalty scores for that same region were also low, with particularly poor performance on customer communication and responsiveness. Bottom line, staff loyalty, focus, and alignment problems ultimately become customer problems. There was little commitment evidenced by employees. Thus, the linkage between stakeholder group perception and behavior was pretty easy to both isolate and correct.

Compared to traditional employee satisfaction and engagement research, there’s a lot to know about identifying the drivers of ambassadorial behavior. Here are some quick guidelines to keep you on track.

Avoid Measuring Employee Satisfaction

Satisfaction has a strong tendency to deal with attitudes and not behaviors. Also, satisfaction has proven to be poorly correlated with actual loyalty and productive behavior. For example, a recent employee study showed that only 10 percent said they were dissatisfied with their employers and their jobs, but 25 percent said they would search for a new job within a year. Instead, ask questions that measure your company’s performance as an employer (i.e., “On a scale from 1 to 5, rate our performance as your employer”) and other question areas that we recommend.

Measure Employees’ Likelihood to Remain with You and Contribute to Your Success

Likewise, measure your employees’ likelihood to recommend the company, or otherwise communicate in positive ways, to other potential employees (i.e., “On a scale from 1 to 5, how likely are you to recommend the company to other potential employees?”). Also, recognize and reward employees for length of service to the enterprise (Figure 1.2).

Develop Specific Job Statements

Detailed elements of day-to-day act...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Foreword: For Employees and Customers, Should the Goal Be Higher Engagement or Higher Experience Value?
• Introduction: Do You Really Wanna Work Here? Are You Happy? Are You Aligned? Are You Productive?
• Chapter 1. The Evolving Role(s) and Needs of Employees … and How to Stay in Front of Them
• Chapter 2. Customer Centricity and Stakeholder Centricity, and the “People-First” Employee Experience
• Chapter 3. Challenges (and Opportunities) Represented by Focus on Employee Satisfaction and Engagement
• Chapter 4. The Linkages Between Employee Commitment and the Customer Experience
• Chapter 5. Building to Employee Ambassadorship: Concept Scoping and Enterprise Value
• Chapter 6. Customers and Employees, and the Emotional Drivers They Share As Stakeholders
• Chapter 7. Measuring the Macro (Enterprise and Group) Level of Employee Ambassadorship
• Chapter 8. Addressing and Assessing the Impact of Employee Negativism and How a Stakeholder-Centric Culture Can Fix This
• Chapter 9. The Employee Life Cycle of the Future and Ambassadorship in Practice
• Afterword: Eyes on the Stakeholder Experience Value Prize
• Index
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