Employee Experience

Create an Engaging Employee Experience

It’s virtually impossible to provide a superior customer experience with dissatisfied employees. Improving the employee experience is about creating an engaging environment where employees know their thoughts and actions are valued so that they are motivated to do their best each day. They are trained and educated on a regular basis to nurture their professional development, and in turn, are committed to the values and goals of the company, and invested in the customer experience they deliver. Content employees are absolutely critical to delighting customers and fulfilling your brand promise. Heart of the Customer can help you learn about your employee experience…and the steps to take to improve it.

CX Webinar Invitation, August 27th

August 22, 2018/1 Comment/in Customer Experience Vision, Customer Journey Mapping, CX Program Strategy, Driving CX Culture Change, Employee Experience, Minneapolis CX, Voice of the Customer /by Jim Tincher

Do your employees love your company?

Jim Tincher joins Shiftonomics to break down the customers’ journey, and how strongly it is impacted by corporate culture and the effort the company puts into empowering its frontline teams.

You’ll Learn

How to hire people who care
Keys to maintaining employee engagement
How to map each customer’s journey

About Taylor Pipes and Jim Tincher

Taylor Pipes, an industry specialist from Branch Messenger, is joined by Jim Tincher to talk about the customer and employee experience. With a lifelong passion for customer experience, Jim founded Heart of the Customer to help companies of all sizes increase customer engagement.

Reserve your spot here.

Interested in workshops? Read more here.

Interested in journey mapping? Read more here.

Interested in improving your CX? Read more here.

How Does a Plant Closure Help Customer Experience?

August 13, 2018/1 Comment/in Customer Experience Vision, CX Program Strategy, Employee Experience, Voice of the Customer /by Jim Tincher

Jean Fasching, Lead Consultant

This is a guest post written by one of our very own Lead Consultants, Jean Fasching

Recently, I ran across a Yahoo Finance post that announced the closure of a plant that produces high fructose corn syrup and industrial starch. In it, an executive mentioned that the closure would help improve Customer Experience commitments. It was a technical and financially dense PR release. But, I wondered, how can a plant closure improve Customer Experience commitments? With a plant closure, production capacity is reduced. This means turn-around-time may increase and trigger an increase in cost. Impacts like this typically don’t lead to an improved customer experience. Just who is this customer? Read more

CX + EX (Employee Experience) = Great Experiences

July 26, 2018/4 Comments/in CX Program Strategy, Employee Experience /by Jim Tincher

Customers will never love a company until the employees love it first. – Simon Simek

This quote reflects one of the biggest disconnects in customer experience – focusing only on the customer experience.

It makes sense. Heck, that’s our name! Why wouldn’t we? But focusing only on the customer without regard to the employee experience leads to missed opportunities and sub-optimized efforts.

I had the great honor to co-present on this topic with Darin Byrne, Wolters Kluwer’s VP of Client Experience. We made three primary arguments to our CX audience:

CX Fails Without Engaged Employees
UX is Critical to Employee Experience
Employee Experience Needs to be Part of Your Day Job

Three Tips for Employee Journey Mapping

April 26, 2018/in Customer Journey Mapping, Employee Experience /by Jim Tincher

Journey mapping is powerful. A clear visualization of your customer’s journey helps rally the company to support a new vision of your customers’ challenges, and how you can make it easier to be your customer.

But why should customers get all the love? If it’s such a powerful tool, shouldn’t we find other uses for it?

Employee journey mapping is often neglected. Or, worse, it’s done in a haphazard way, foregoing the discipline we use for our customers. But there’s no shortage of research on the linkage between the customer and employee experiences. Consider using your journey mapping process for customers.

Three Tips for Applying Journey Mapping to your Employees Read more

Three steps to create customer-focused change

June 29, 2017/in CX Program Strategy, Driving CX Culture Change, Employee Experience /by Jim Tincher

Customer experience (CX) is about change.

I wrote about this last week. But there’s a lot of confusion about the best way to create this change.

Immature CX practitioners often see themselves there to drive the business. They see their role as being on the outside, there to show the business what the customers really want. And this role feels good. “I represent the customer, and am here to show you what they want” is an easy go-to place.

It’s also a terrible way to create sustainable change. Read more

YMCA Quirk’s Cover Story

April 18, 2017/in Customer Journey Mapping, CX Program Strategy, Employee Experience /by Jim Tincher

Journey mapping is worthless without the organizational focus to improve. This article shares how the YMCA of the Greater Twin Cities used journey mapping to better retain their Millennial customers.

Building Customer Empathy: An Interview with Natalie Schneider

February 23, 2017/1 Comment/in CX Program Strategy, Employee Experience, Interviews with CX Experts /by Jim Tincher

Anthem, Inc. is in the middle of customer experience (CX) resurgence. I had the chance to catch up with Natalie Schneider, VP of Customer Experience, to learn more about their efforts to help build customer empathy in their employees.

Tell us a little about what led you to start working on customer experience.

A few years ago we at Anthem realized that our company’s growth was going to have to start coming from consumers—a B2C approach, rather than what we had been doing, which was largely B2B. Once we saw that, we quickly realized that our B2C operations were completely unsatisfactory—it was a kind of “OMG” moment for us, and so we started really investing in customer experience and putting together a team to try to fix what we were lacking.

We had a lot to learn—we hadn’t been looking at things from the customer’s perspective at all, and had a very insular, inside-out perspective. To buy a product on our website the customer had to go through 22 clicks! But we moved the needle. When we started, there were probably fewer than ten associates who even knew what the term Net Promoter Score even meant—three years later and we’ve improved our NPS by double digits, and business leaders talk about it constantly, across the company.

Don’t Forget to Map the Employee Journey

February 7, 2017/in Customer Journey Mapping, CX Program Strategy, Employee Experience /by Jim Tincher

A while ago I led a journey mapping workshop at the ICMI conference. It was a ton of fun, as we mapped out how Amanda chooses her new health insurance plan. We looked at how and when to use journey mapping (answers: frequently, and in partnership with customers).

During a break, one call center director asked me whether journey mapping can be used to map out employee journeys. That’s when I realized my mistake. I’m so passionate about mapping the customer journeys that I completely forgot to talk about how journey mapping is also a great tool to use for employee journeys.

Connecting with Employees

Employee journeys are critically important to your customer experience. As Bruce Temkin says, you can’t create an engaged customer with disengaged employees. Journey mapping is a great tool to understand the friction your employees face as they serve your customers.
Read more

Interview with Bob Thomas of the YMCA: Confident Employees Make Satisfied Customers

December 12, 2016/0 Comments/in Driving CX Culture Change, Employee Experience, Interviews with CX Experts /by Jim Tincher

Bob, not in the proper uniform

Bob Thomas is the chief experience officer for the YMCA of the Greater Twin Cities, a leading nonprofit dedicated to strengthening communities through youth development, healthy living, and social responsibility. He is responsible for engaging community members to help them meet their personal goals while ensuring a great Y experience through integrated marketing, membership sales, and healthy living programs including swim lessons, group exercise, personal training, chronic disease prevention, and healthy aging. Prior to joining the Y, Bob held marketing, sales, and sales operations leadership positions at Boston Scientific. He holds a bachelor’s degree in economics and English from the University of St. Thomas. Bob serves as the chair of the board of The Sheridan Story and actively volunteers at Colonial Church of Edina.

Bob recently led a rollout of new uniforms for the Y’s employees, referred to as team members. The goal was to influence team members to better engage with customers and further increase their pride in the Y brand. Team branding creates a work environment where every decision and every behavior embodies the specific attributes of the brand. We asked him more about the move to the new uniforms.

You recently led a change to the YMCA team uniforms. Could you tell us a little about the background of the uniforms, and why it was time for a change?

About six years ago, the Y switched from their old, black-and-red logo to a dual-color logo that uses five different color combinations, which was meant to symbolize diversity and flexibility. The change in logo came with a change in uniform: At the time the decision was made to embrace all of the colors of the new brand, so the uniforms consisted of polo shirts that came in a variety of colors, but were primarily white—which meant they showed dirt, and looked bad even after very little basic wear-and-tear. To add to that, they didn’t fit very well, and team members soon began to express their disappointment with the required uniform. The uniform became known as the “bowling shirts.” Read more

Every customer experience project is a culture project

November 17, 2016/1 Comment/in CX Program Strategy, Driving CX Culture Change, Employee Experience /by Jim Tincher

Culture is the biggest determinant of effective customer experience. While that’s especially evident in the service space, it’s also true for every other type of company. When your culture focuses more on its own viewpoint than your customers’, you end up with convoluted processes, terrible return policies, and overly-complicated products.

That’s why I was happy to see some of the results from our first-ever journey mapping survey. We’re finalizing the analysis, which will be available soon. So, here’s a teaser about some of the results that are relevant to building a customer-focused culture. Read more