The views expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their very own.
There are few guarantees in business, but this one is certain: If you do not keep your customers, you will not be in business for long. But at a time when most corporations are desperately trying maintain customer loyalty (retention is more profitable than acquisitionUltimately, there’s often a missing link in their operations: understanding the powerful connection between customer satisfaction and employee engagement — and how to unlock it.
As the Chief People Officer currently overseeing my company’s customer organization, I’ve seen firsthand how intertwined they are. At their simplest, losing customers can have a direct impact on employee morale and even lead to unlucky talent churn. But there’s more nuance to the connection: almost all the pieces that employees do has the potential to profoundly impact customers. In turn, customer feedback and outcomes can have a powerful impact on an employee’s sense of purpose, achievement, and satisfaction.
I’ve seen how establishing a customer-centric approach across an organization can lead to growth opportunities that profit each employees and customers. But to achieve this, corporations must leverage this connection by putting customer success at the forefront of every employee’s experience. Here’s how.
Make customer success everyone’s responsibility
Most corporations take a siloed approach to customer success, relegating it to a single department, while others remain largely isolated from customer interactions. But I’ve come to realize that the more we empower All The more our cross-functional teams contribute to customer success, the more purposeful, influential, and engaging their roles will turn into, and the more they’ll find a way to increase customer loyalty and retention.
When it comes to a more holistic approach, I’m a proponent bow tie model. Unlike a traditional marketing funnel that ends when a customer converts, the bow tie provides a more comprehensive representation of the customer journey. It’s a higher way to make sure that everyone in the company is maximizing customer engagement over the long run—whether through strategic ongoing communications and marketing efforts or more integrated processes and practices designed to deepen that relationship.
One way we do this at my company is to encourage every department to evaluate every task—and every query—through the lens of customer profit. Whether it’s marketing, sales, product, or engineering, that filter is applied to every decision. Of course, we also consider metrics like customer satisfaction rating, customer retention, and revenue expansion with existing customers to make sure our efforts are translating into results.
Increase customer touchpoints
I recently traveled overseas to meet with a client, and as I used to be leaving, their CFO turned to me and said something I’ll always remember: “Don’t let me get fired.” It’s a powerful reminder that our view of customer success should be broader than simply ensuring integration or product stability. Everything we do has a knock-on effect on the success of their company, which may affect their personal fame.
Concept radical empathy is nothing latest in customer service. Cultivating a deeper understanding of customer needs is essential for effective product development, marketing, and sales, but it could easily get lost once a customer is onboarded. Building more proactive customer touchpoints—even building them into the early stages of product development—can assist overcome this oversight.
For us, this implies attending industry events and building strategic channels and sharing information. society to higher understand their pain points. We also established customer segments and verticals to discover and interact with the unique needs of various kinds of customers to provide a personalized approach to service. When we understand how customers use our product — and in particular their pain points — we will higher goal all the pieces from our marketing and sales campaigns to all product-centric initiatives
Everyone in our organization knows that customer retention is a team sport. Contacting customers to resolve product issues or when introducing something latest is not only possible, but preferable. That’s why we launched a customer retention program that treats flight risk as a pipeline and leverages highly coordinated collaboration across departments to ensure impact for those customers.
Most importantly, these frequent and proactive touchpoints also allow us to learn Is working for our clients, which is a strong motivator for our team.
Don’t Miss the Connection Between Employee Experience and Customer Experience
Being the recipient of an exceptional customer experience can transform the way we perceive a company. It seems that when an employee plays a part in it, it could have just as much of an impact.
This should come as no surprise: today employees are looking for purpose in their work. Who doesn’t want to make a difference in the lives of others? Combining that desire with customer success initiatives makes sense—it improves your ability to deliver on your guarantees to customers AND makes the workplace more rewarding for everyone.
And I consider organizations can take this connection a step further: by putting the same energy into employee experience that they put into meeting customer expectations. In one of my previous roles, we actively measured customer retention versus employee retention and found a strong correlation between the two. The results were interesting, but not shocking: prioritizing employee experience leads to greater employee engagementwho in turn are motivated to create higher customer experiences. Simply put, increasing satisfaction in one camp can effectively increase retention and the level of productivity for each parties.
Sure, it’s not all the time easy to achieve this balance. But in my experience, incremental improvements add up over time. Starting small is higher than not starting at all. At the end of the day, the more your employees know, understand, and care about your customers, the higher they’ll serve them (and the more they’ll enjoy the results) — no matter their role. And that’s a real win-win for the bottom line.