Six key rules for engaging your customer facing employees
Performance improvement company Grass Roots incorporates six rules of engagement in each learning program, addressing employees’ attitudes, emotions, knowledge and skills. Ian Luxford, learning services director, describes how GAME, Barclays and Camelot have benefited from this strategy.
by Ian Luxford, Learning Services Director at Grass Roots
Many companies focus on enhancing their employees’ knowledge and skills of the products or services they are offering, in order to turn them into better customer service representatives. However, the intangible element that actually makes for successful customer interaction is employee engagement. Staff who are passionate about what they do, and who choose to give the best, will deliver a great customer experience.
The most iconic brands are not defined by the product they produce or the level of service they are associated with. They succeed because their customers’ experience of them is one that is special and which they can appreciate, enjoy and remember. If a customer is more than happy with the service they receive, they will more than likely use that company again. Furthermore, they will recommend it to others.
In these recessionary times, as much as in brighter ones, employee engagement is vital to the survival of a business. In spite of this, it's often fatally overlooked by employers, as attitude is something which can't be taught, and traditionally organizations are used to teaching people to do things. I can use the most effective methods of training to provide colleagues with the knowledge and skills they need to understand and deliver this, but if this is all I do, it's very unlikely that my customers will experience anything different.
A great customer experience can only be delivered by someone who wants to give it. A greater knowledge and understanding of your company does not necessarily make you care any more about it. You need more.
A great customer experience can only be delivered by someone who wants to give it. A greater knowledge and understanding of your company does not necessarily make you care any more about it. You need more.
At Grass Roots, we create learning programs that address employees’ attitudes and emotions, as well as their knowledge and skills. These include blended learning courses, incorporating face-to-face interaction with virtual computer based training and group-based, action learning.
Six key rules of engagement
We have six key "rules of engagement", which we implement into every program we create.
1. Start at the end
The objective of any training is for employees to gain experience which enables them to provide better levels of service. Start by understanding the fundamentals of that experience – what it looks and feels like and how to make the experience real for the people who are learning how to deliver it.
Creating Xcitement at GAME
We created ‘Xcite’, a bespoke program aimed at improving customer service by exciting store staff with knowledge and options about their customer’s potential purchase for GAME, the leading video and PC game specialist retailer.
The project started with an assessment of the customer experience and the sales process in stores. Engaging with the retail team established opportunities to improve sales techniques and confidence amongst store staff. The company’s service model was oriented more towards customer service than sales and it was agreed that adopting a stronger loyalty-orientated culture at store-level could help drive top-line growth.
2. Infect
The second step is to "infect", by creating a cascade effect within a company. People are influenced by their peers and immediate managers far more than they are influenced by a trainer. Therefore, it's important that managers take some of the responsibility for getting the rest of the staff involved and then recognize individuals who have already taken the training on board. They can then equip them to engage others.
Store and regional managers were critical in terms of their buy-in and trust in the GAME Xcite program, as they would be responsible for driving and cascading the program and ongoing development of their teams.
Going above and beyond at Camelot
For UK lottery operator Camelot, we were tasked with equipping managers to promote the tangible recognition of employees who demonstrated role model behaviors. The "Above & Beyond" scheme helped to strengthen Camelot’s performance management system. It gave employees a better understanding of how their work fits in with the strategic aims of their business and helped managers assess how well employees performed against clearly defined goals.
3. Recognize and reinforce
"Above & Beyond" also offers a clear example of our third step. This takes heed of the idea that positive attitudes spread very quickly when there is overt recognition of people who do the right thing.
The Camelot programme allows managers to offer immediate rewards to staff who go the extra mile as well as living and role modeling the company’s behaviours of creative, empowering, ownership, partnering and passionate. Rewards to staff are made through a platform, Awards4Me, which stores rewards for redemption and provides staff with access to voluntary benefits including travel, high street vouchers and thousands of items of merchandise such as electrical goods, clothes and CDs.
"Above & Beyond" has been running for over two years. During this time Camelot’s staff survey results have improved and the company has risen in the list of Sunday Times Best 100 Companies To Work For.
“Above and Beyond has improved the internal perception of recognition and all staff have a very clear understanding of what they need to achieve to secure an instant reward,” says Catherine West, Camelot’s Reward Manager.
4. Demand pull
This stage is about generating interest and promoting curiosity about what staff can do to give a great customer experience. Through this, you can open people’s minds to the kind of learning they need. People will learn if they want to learn.
Fig. 1: Barclays' deck of cards - part of an intiative to improve engagement among store employees
Among the many techniques used to improve customer service in the Barclays program was the production of a deck of 52 playing cards, each one containing a different activity that focused on promoting one of the "Be…" behaviors and split into categories such as Brainstorm, Make a Difference and Thought Provoker, (see image, left). Some activities were very short and simple, such as finding out the name of each customer and using it, others could be dipped into over a number of days. The deck of cards kept the behaviors in the forefront of minds for a sustained period and kept people actively building an understanding of the issues, long after any formal training events had been completed.
The feedback from one of Barclays' customer service managers was that, “The program has taken our knowledge of our customers’ journey to the next level. The combined use of education, measurement and feedback has delivered a programme that will help us make Barclays’ customer service the best on the high street.”
How Barclays customer service remains way ahead
Barclays Bank’s "Way Ahead" program introduced all branch and contact center staff to a set of behaviors designed to take customer service to a new level. It was designed to inspire staff and improve performance based upon six behaviors designed to support specific business goals:
- Be…welcoming
- Be…inquisitive
- Be…knowledgeable
- Be…innovative
- Be…proud
- Be…memorable
As well as attracting customers, Barclays has to maximize the value of its loyal ones – a challenge made easier if branch and call center employees deliver an outstanding customer experience.
To ensure that managers remained engaged and committed, the program launched with a video that raised more questions than it answered – generating curiosity and demand for more guidance. The launch also included issuing a weekly planner that trailed the activities for the weeks to come – showing people how their questions would be answered and how they could become involved, without dictating the solution.
The overall results of "Way Ahead" showed that the average score across all the target behaviors rose by 15%. The specific score for "Be…knowledgeable" rose from the initial 55% to an impressive 92%.
5. Active, not passive
People will only engage with a subject if they're able to take actions and feel in control. Blended learning provides opportunities for involvement and interaction, which enables people to get inside the subjects they're expected to know about and allows learning to continue way beyond a learning event such as a course. The more closely learning can be related to actual work, the more effective it will be.
Given GAME staff’s sophistication with multimedia, it was imperative that the sales learning in "Xcite" was communicated and delivered in a motivational way. Employees were given tools to more effectively approach customers, offer advice and assistance and offer specialist support.
Figure 2. Xcite training video game on DVD
"Xcite" identified three types of customer and training focused around a fun, interactive and totally "on brand" DVD which appealed to the company’s young workforce. Presented in the style of a video game, the contents included in-store scenarios where the service received was scored by the user, who could select from an array of customer profiles. Staff were encouraged to identify their own personal commitments and action plans. (See image, left.)
The pilot to 17 stores saw an uplift in sales and positive feedback from customers and staff. On this basis, "Xcite" was rolled out to the entire GAME estate in during 2008, involving 3,500 participants. GAME’s Training and Design Manager Sharon Wisniewski told us that: “Our colleagues are fully engaged in our initiatives to continually enhance customer service.”
6. "A little piece of me"
This stage recognizes that there's no formula for making the customer experience happen. Allowing every level of a workforce to play some part in shaping the way the experience can be delivered leads to a well-developed solution. More importantly each individual employee feels valued and is given a sense of worth, making them more inclined to perform and help the customer.
The customer service and sales model used in GAME Xcite was not prescriptive – it did not dictate phrases or body language store staff should use. Instead employees were encouraged to share their own passion for the products, to give customers clear advice and information.
Crucially, staff were able to bring their personality to the role and find methods that worked best for them. Sales staff now understand the benefits to themselves, as well as the customer, of employing these training techniques. Team discussions kept up the momentum and one store manager commented, "our staff loved the fact they were encouraged to actually talk about the games they love.”
To create the ultimate customer experience employee engagement is absolutely essential. Research has proven the links between engagement, performance, advocacy and staff retention levels, so when these six steps are combined, the benefit to the employer and the brand are endless.
Have your say
How have you rolled out a program that involves engaging employees to improve customer service? What did it involve? And how did you measure the results?
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