How To Drive A Customer-Centric Culture With Active Employee Listening

Just as understanding the customer journey is a must for a good customer experience (CX), so is doing it with how the employee experience (EX) can support that journey.

According to Gartner research, 64% of customer-facing employees say “unnecessary effort” prevents them from delivering a higher-quality customer experience. This could include any task that an agent does on a regular basis that is too complex or repetitive, in a way that negatively impacts her ability to create the best CX.

But driving customer focus isn’t just about making employees care more; in fact, most of them already do. Focusing on the customer is also about empowering agents with the right skills.

Organisations cannot achieve the goal of being a customer-centric company by investing only in customer-focused technology, content, and interactions. They must also include the underlying infrastructure behind the CX, and that also includes the employee experience (EX).

How To Drive A Customer-Centric Culture With Active Employee Listening

1) Identifying If the Employee Journey Can Support Your CX Vision

Many executive leaders recognise that the daily experience of employees and the quality of customer experiences are related. Yet most still build on their vision without ensuring that the employees who are responsible for delivering on that ambition are supported. This leads to more than half of employees not believing that their company allows them to offer a good customer experience.

Just as understanding the customer journey is a must for good CX, so is doing it with how the EX can support that journey. It is important to balance the organisation’s focus on understanding the needs of its customers.

2) Practicing Continuous Listening To Employees

The ideal customer journey depends on the business capabilities that support each customer touch point. Leaders of high-performing CX companies demonstrate personal responsibility and interest in whether these points are working as intended for customers and employees.

Doing this shows that leadership is committed to preparing employees for success. In turn, that commitment will translate into them doing the same for customers. In fact, according to Gartner research, the top three manager behaviours that correlate with employee motivation to deliver good CX mention the customer just once and focus on helping employees do their best work.

3) Enabling a Culture of Active Listening and Closed-Loop Feedback

To gain more insight from employees about the sources of unnecessary effort in the work environment, ask yourself, “What’s holding you back?” or “What’s getting in your way?” The objective of active listening is to understand the intention behind what employees express and is characterised by showing empathy, patience and objectivity.

Successful companies will also implement a closed-loop feedback system to ensure that the people giving it feel that they have been heard. It’s critical to share specific actions taken based on an employee’s feedback or any problem resolutions that are being planned or in progress.

While it is not necessary to implement every employee idea, it is more important that the leadership team demonstrate a commitment to setting them up for success by sharing progress reports. Ultimately, this responsiveness builds credibility with employees that their feedback is valuable and useful in driving change and improving CX.

4) Removing Barriers Throughout the Organisation

Closing the loop on employee feedback helps operationalise accountability, but organisations looking to transform culture need to keep the “value of visibility” in mind.

Companies that recognise internal pain points, as well as the employees who solve them, encourage them to share their feedback by demonstrating that the organisation will address their problems. Leaders who identify, scale, and remove employee barriers to improving the customer experience need to be recognised as part of CX recognition and rewards programs or in other visible forums throughout the organisation.

In conclusion, in building a customer-centric culture, the EX has too often been ignored or underappreciated. This is why call centers need to be run by people who think about the employees behind them and then ensure that the technologies and insights they offer break down barriers rather than create more. By focusing on the employee journey alongside the customer journey, organisations can build a truly customer-centric culture.

For this reason, it is important to have specific call center software for the customer service department, regardless of the size of the company. That is, implement the same system that is used in large contact centers and make it accessible to all customer service departments and integrate it into the ecosystem: prioritisation of agents based on data, AI, calls and chat, and WhatsApp to respond to customers and much more.