When the
customer experience starts at home
To
serve end customers better, begin with your employees.
Charity, the saying goes, begins
at home. So too does a superior customer experience.
Growing numbers of companies are coming to recognize the
benefits of customer-centric strategies: higher revenues, lower costs, and
stronger employee and customer loyalty. In the effort to transform customer
journeys and refine direct interactions with clients, however, many companies
overlook the need to engage the whole organization, including its support
functions, in a customer-centric transformation.
That’s unfortunate. Turning the support functions (such
as information technology, finance, human resources, purchasing, and real
estate) into excellent customer-service operations is a powerful lever to
sustain and expand a full customer-centric transformation. It helps to create a
new service culture that deepens customer-centric efforts in all layers of the
organization. It promotes a longer-term impact and the full engagement of the
staff by applying the principles of customer excellence to employees’ journeys.
At leading customer-centric companies, such as Disney, creating great customer
experiences begins with a common vision and
requires an engaged and
energized workforce that can translate individual experiences into
satisfying end-to-end customer journeys. The logic of extending that commitment
inside, to support staff, is powerful.
In our experience, successful large organizations think
more and more about end-to-end transformations that focus on internal
customers—their employees—as well as external ones, to gain a durable
competitive edge. Not that this is easy to do. Such efforts can take two or
three years to execute fully for all internal customer journeys. And rather
than being a kind of employee-satisfaction exercise, typically conducted by the
HR department, an effort to bring support staff into a true culture of customer
service requires clear and ambitious objectives, earmarked resources, and
involved sponsorship from C-suite leaders.
The good news is that these efforts can run in parallel
with externally facing customer-experience programs, each complementing and
reinforcing the other. This exercise delivers results. In our experience,
redesigning customer journeys raises customer-satisfaction scores by 15 to 20
points, reduces costs to serve by 15 to 20 percent, and boosts employee
engagement by 20 percent.
This article focuses on assessing the benefits of engaging
support functions in customer-centric transformations and defines the
methodology and principles for leading such programs successfully.
Why transforming
internal services matters
A superior customer-experience strategy goes well beyond
making products and services as good as they can be. It weaves a seamless web
of “customer first” activity that extends from the vision of boardroom
executives to the individual actions of frontline workers in day-to-day
exchanges with customers. The closer a company can align its commitment to
customer-centricity with the interests of its employees, the closer it will get
to achieving its customer-strategy goals.
Yet many companies struggle to align themselves
internally behind these goals. Some, like banks, face security and regulatory
constraints that make it hard to deliver internal services in a smooth and
quick way—for instance, tight criteria for storing and sharing data limit the
access of employees to multiple sources of information across locations.
Worried about noncompliance, some companies place extreme limits on themselves,
hurting their efforts to work efficiently, smoothly, and quickly. One bank, for
example, stored all its data at the highest level of confidentiality,
restricting its employees’ access to useful nonconfidential information.
At other companies, siloed organizational functions
address individual touchpoints in a customer’s journey but leave no one
responsible for the end-to-end experience. What’s more, in the search for
efficiency and the advantages of scale effects, companies build large teams
devoted to specific topics, creating silos that disconnect support functions
from their users. Still other companies, which emphasize their external image
and customer-experience efforts to the detriment of internal services, treat
support functions not as core drivers of corporate health but as targets for
cost cutting.
Such oversights can be costly. When companies fail to
maximize the quality of their internal services, they disconnect the customer
experience that their employees encounter at work from the one they aspire to
create for their frontline people in dealing with customers. Françoise
Mercadal-Delasalles, group head of corporate resources and innovation at the
French bank Société Générale, says “that if you want your front-end employees
to be very good at the relationship with their clients, then the core of the
company, including the support functions in particular, has to be very good
with the front”.
Experience often lags
behind the external one as a top-management priority. That’s a shame because
the implications for good customer service are many.
·
First,
in our experience, the quality of internal services ultimately has a direct
impact on the experience of external customers. Which customer, for example,
doesn’t rely on internal services (such as IT) to define the customer
relationship? At one international airline, the IT department failed to
synchronize its front-office tools with a new IT infrastructure. Without
correct information on flights and bookings, employees couldn’t serve their
customers, and that led to massive delays and flight cancellations.
·
Second,
in a competitive market for talented people, offering employees a seamless
experience at work can be part of a company’s value proposition to attract and
retain talented people. Moreover, encouraging a customer-first culture in
support functions tends to inspire back-office employees with a heightened
sense of ownership, which boosts their retention rates, just as it does in
transformations of externally facing customer teams.
·
Third,
transforming the internal-customer experience will probably not only increase
the satisfaction of employees but also help to cut costs by increasing productivity,
eliminating inefficiencies in processes, and reducing absences. For instance,
digitizing manual processes increases efficiency in a significant way and
reduces wasted time for employees. In our experience, such successful
transformations can cut the total cost of the journeys by 25 percent within two
or three years. These savings can be reinvested in growth efforts and other
projects.
Measuring and
understanding internal-customer satisfaction
First and foremost, companies must understand their
employees’ level and drivers of satisfaction with the working environment and
services. We find that the best approach is a structured one that truly reveals
the sources of satisfaction and the way to improve them. Too many companies do
not measure employee satisfaction or the support functions’ performance
effectively and so fail to understand the needs of the employees using these
internal services. The result is a diminished opportunity to take corrective
action.
Why are companies ill equipped to assess
internal-customer issues properly? Some put measuring employee satisfaction in
the hands of the HR department. Often, HR sends out employee-satisfaction
surveys with disparate, generic questions that don’t address the forces that
drive satisfaction or dissatisfaction and are disconnected from the daily
experience of work. That survey-intense approach doesn’t help companies to
understand the root causes of employee satisfaction and isn’t always followed
by the appropriate corrective action. Employees are left frustrated.
A European bank, for example, discovered that its
employees were dissatisfied with their technology and tools. To bridge the gap,
it offered them tablets. Most of these devices ended up ignored in drawers
because they were hard to use and full of technical glitches. The bank thus
added costs without making its employees more satisfied. In the end, it
generated additional frustration.
This missed opportunity highlights the need to assess in
detail the drivers of internal customers’ satisfaction before finding the right
levers to improve it. After launching a customer-satisfaction survey devoted to
the journeys of employees, the bank concluded that they were primarily
dissatisfied not with the obsolescence of the tools but rather with their complexity.
Synchronizing passwords to log onto applications, for instance, would have made
the employees significantly more satisfied with the hardware.
In many cases, companies choose to address their
employees’ satisfaction and dissatisfaction in the wrong way. Like many
diagnoses of external-customer experiences, employee-customer-experience
efforts often focus on touchpoints—the individual interactions support staffers
have with their colleagues—rather than on end-to-end
customer journeys. That exposes a company to the possibility of failing
to understand and improve its users’ satisfaction because it can’t see blind
spots and misses important cross-functional issues.
Defining and
measuring internal satisfaction
Measuring the satisfaction of employees with internal
services ought to involve a user-centric methodology. In most cases, these
efforts focus on a set of 10 to 20 journeys that are relevant because of their
frequency, importance, or cost. While we illustrate this point for
business-to-consumer (B2C) services (such as IT for all employees), a similar
analysis is also possible for business-to-business (B2B) services (for
instance, IT services for IT operators).
Defining the journeys of employees and preparing to
survey them should follow a two-step approach. First, you need to define a list
of journeys to explore, filtered by the criteria above. In most cases, only ten
journeys account for about 80 percent of customer-satisfaction results. These
journeys are cross-functional by nature. It is therefore important that key
people responsible for all departments that deliver services to employees
gather to define the journeys and embrace the customer perspective. Avoid
trying to define journeys within organizational silos; for instance, a journey
like “I am a new employee in the firm” involves HR (to provide contracts and
validations), the purchasing office (to produce badges), the real-estate
department (to secure an office), IT (to deliver hardware and software),
finance (to share bank-account documentation), and so on.
Next, to ensure that the list is complete and
representative, test it with employees who use these internal services. To
survey employees about the fine-grained elements of journeys, it is important
to surface the details. In fact, the objective of surveying employees about
their satisfaction with internal journeys is not just to assess it. Above all,
this effort aims to understand the elements that drive satisfaction or
dissatisfaction with the journeys and in this way to identify and establish
priorities for transforming them. To do so, the detailing exercise should break
down the steps employees go through during these journeys, with input from
those who operate them and those who use them. Live observation of the journeys
should be part of the effort.
Analyzing the ratings and feedback gathered through the
survey will help companies to understand:
·
what
really influences employees’ satisfaction with internal services
·
the
level of satisfaction with each of the journeys
·
what
drives satisfaction or dissatisfaction with each journey
These findings will determine the priority areas for an
effort to transform the internal-customer experience. They will also help
companies to avoid complex efforts that won’t be rewarded.
A European insurance company, for example, took more
than a year to develop a comprehensive employee portal that aggregated all
links to internal requests and information about support functions. The IT team
led the effort but didn’t analyze the needs of internal customers, test
features with the user base, or provide training on how to use them. After
releasing the portal, employees were not using it at all, because it was
complex and required several passwords for access. After a structured
internal-customer-centric transformation, the company refocused its efforts on
improving journeys that mattered more to employees. As a result, their
satisfaction with internal services increased significantly.
What do employees
want?
Over the course of conducting several
internal-customer-experience surveys at large companies, we have drawn some
conclusions about the major areas of dissatisfaction employees experience with
internal services.
Among
them:
·
the
availability and clarity of information
·
the
overall time needed to complete tasks required by support functions
·
the
effort required to go through processes involving support functions
Our research has also helped us compile data on
categories of employee needs and sources of satisfaction and to develop a
hierarchy of what employees want from customer-centric organizations. The more
advanced a company is in its customer-centric thinking, the more likely it is
that the determinants of employee satisfaction will evolve from basic courtesy
by the staff to the availability and timely delivery of information and,
finally, to an enjoyable and seamless experience resolving problems and issues
on the first swipe.
Key success factors
for conducting an internal-customer-centric transformation
As with any customer-centric transformation, an
internal-user-centric one requires organizations to put in place design and
governance prerequisites:
One is establishing the right overall
architecture—setting a clear and aspiring vision, including a change story;
drawing up a governance blueprint; drafting an initiative road map; and
aligning the organization on metrics and objectives. In addition, to change
mind-sets and behavior and to ensure that the whole organization works to give
internal customers an outstanding experience, the company must develop and
implement purpose-driven change-management principles defining a new way to
work.
Another prerequisite is setting up cross-functional
transformation teams representing all functions and departments involved in
internal-customer journeys. To be autonomous and to test all relevant ideas in
a risk-free environment, the teams must run the transformation by defining
their own rules and scoping out activities they could not undertake if
operating in a regular day-to-day environment.
Besides the traditional key success factors encountered
in customer-centric transformations generally, our experience running
internal-customer-centric transformations has highlighted factors specific to
them:
Managing a cultural transition to refocus support
functions on the customer.
Although frontline employees are constantly in touch
with customers, the support functions may well have become increasingly
disconnected from them and developed their own purposes and motivations,
detached from the company’s. To refocus support functions on the customer,
organizations should mobilize a range of outreach efforts. These include
creating an understanding of and a commitment to the need to increase
internal-customer satisfaction; reinforcing internal-customer-satisfaction
mechanisms, including customer-feedback loops and incentives; building the
skills and capabilities required to deliver services for internal customers;
and modeling desired behavior by the heads of support functions to demonstrate
the importance of the internal-customer experience.
A bank, for instance, tried to encourage a
customer-centric transformation of its support functions without stimulating
this kind of cultural transition. By failing to create a sense of common
purpose and aspiration, the bank also failed to engage its employees. The
result was only small-scale progress.
Building strong links between the support units and the
business to ensure alignment of interests and close collaboration.
One manufacturer pursued a customer-centric
transformation of the information-technology department by putting in place
intermediary roles between IT and the business, to serve as an interface
between them. The result: the IT teams became disconnected from the business,
while the intermediaries didn’t convey messages from the business to IT and
vice versa effectively. By removing these roles, reestablishing direct links
between the two entities, developing tools better suited to the needs of
employees, and including them at all stages of product development, the company
significantly increased the satisfaction of the business and IT operators
alike.
Giving support units direct contact with internal and
external customer feedback relevant to their actions.
A private bank ran the customer-centric transformation
of the frontline and support functions in parallel. Employees of the support
functions attended “client arenas,” where clients shared their experience of
and feelings about their relationship with the bank. During these meetings,
clients complained about constraints on activities (such as making some
transactions) because of multiple restrictive compliance requirements. This was
a decisive moment for the compliance function, which had resisted interacting
with clients in the past. By standing in the shoes of the clients, the compliance
team changed its purpose from acting solely to protect the bank to providing a
smooth customer experience while continuing to play its protective role.
Companies hoping to tap into the competitive advantages
of a superior customer experience would do well to look inward as well as
outward. Including employees in a culture of customer-centric thinking is a
powerful way to build not only organizational loyalty but also effective
outreach to end customers.
By
Sylvie Bardaune, Sébastien Lacroix, and Nicolas Maechler
http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/marketing-and-sales/our-insights/when-the-customer-experience-starts-at-home?cid=other-eml-alt-mip-mck-oth-1705&hlkid=d0c1c70af56b426a8d9d406cda933f52&hctky=1627601&hdpid=70311958-6448-433b-8c3c-7bdec39abdc0
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