Opinion

How poor employee training can damage a brand’s value

Employees are the most valuable asset in the customer experience game and poor training can have do serious damage to a brand's value, writes David Blakers, managing director of MaritzCX.

In May this year, Starbucks closed 8,000 of its stores across the United States for racial-bias training after two men were arrested in one of its stores in Philadelphia. A video of the arrest was widely shared and sparked protests and calls for a boycott over the alleged racial-profiling by an employee.

The fallout from Starbucks’ racial bias scandal is a timely reminder of the effects of poor staff training on a brand’s reputation

The incident serves as a timely reminder that the actions of one employee can have a significant effect on operations; Starbucks is known for providing excellent customer service and a good working environment (famously providing health insurance for part-time staff and free tuition for all) but this incident has, for the moment, cast a shadow on its reputation.

This is why it’s important for brands who are investing in customer experience programs to remember how critical their employees are to the process and invest in both understanding their engagement and improving their employee experience.

Emotional intelligence

Forrester has talked about the three ‘E’s’ of customer service – ease, effectiveness and emotion.

Advances in technology are making great inroads for the first two, but the emotional ‘E’ can often be overlooked.

There can be many reasons for this but by and large it’s because the first two (ease and
effectiveness) can largely be addressed by the intelligent application of technology, whilst although emotion analysis can (and should) be automated, it is down to real life employees to use its insights to respond and change behaviours accordingly.

And whilst it makes sense that engaged and empowered employees provide a better customer
experience, it can be hard to prove it and gain additional budget to drive forward employee engagement programmes with an increasingly metric driven C-Suite.

You don’t know what you don’t know

This is because there is often a lack of knowledge when it comes to employees and their experience.

Brands are now spending millions on customer experience programs to understand who their
customers are, but rarely invest as much energy in finding out about their employees.

For a company that may be striving for excellence in customer experience, this can be a false economy. No matter how amazing a customer experience the brand team design, if the staff tasked to deliver it don’t have the tools and training to deliver it then the experience (and the significant investment) falls over.

Companies like Virgin have long understood this, with Richard Branson famously noting, “Clients do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients.”

Stop, look and listen

The first step to taking care of employees is to truly listen to them. It is increasingly common for brand teams to map out the customer journey and work out the most important and worst performing steps of the journey – and doing the same for the employee experience can be incredibly powerful.

This not only gives insight into pain points from onboarding, through training and annual reviews, but in my experience, if you overlay this information over the customer journey you will see correlations in the pain points which makes it much easier to go back and fix the issues. For larger companies there are Voice of Employee programmes that can manage this, but the principle remains the same for companies of all sizes – listen and act.

Build the same culture

If there is a gulf between the experience you design for your customers and the day to day experience of your employees then you’ve got a problem. It isn’t feasible to create a ‘customer obsessed’ organisation if employees feel disengaged – no matter how many workshops you hold.

There isn’t a one size fits way to build aligned culture, but in my experience, the companies that are most successful in this regard have a leadership team that set the tone and pace from the top, have a team or individual specifically assigned to work on company culture and robust channels of communication and feedback built into day to day operations.

You can’t be what you don’t see (or hear)

Intention plays a big role in improving employee engagement – companies must ensure that they clearly articulate their vision and values, bringing them to life with what good customer service looks like and feels like and sounds like. Creating a common customer related goal for the entire organisation, that everyone is accountable for can also be a strong motivator for teams to identify and address process or structural issues that preclude them from delivering optimal customer service.

In fact, in the US online shoe and clothing company Zappos famously offered employees around four weeks of pay to leave after their call centre training if they didn’t feel aligned to their values; most definitely an emphatic way to articulate intention and employee values! Zappos was ultimately acquired by Amazon and they too adopted the policy.

The bottom line is customer obsessed organisations don’t spring out of a cultural vacuum.

Investing in customer experience without investing in your employees is a net sum game, so it’s time to pay attention to your most valuable asset in the customer experience game – your employees.

David Blakers is managing director of MaritzCX.

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