Front line employees need the information to improve the customer expereience one customer at a time.
The old way of providing a procedure to a low skill front line employee and asking them to follow it, is over. Why? Because for a business to succeed today it needs to be remarkable, asking somebody to follow a process will only result in the allowable tolerances (KPI’s) that you set. If the goal and proceedure is not what the customer actually wants, then your going to miss the mark. So how do you let your front line employees change to customer requirements and have the power to make change? Create a closed loop process, and start listening to your customers.
An example of a closed loop process is; a customer requests a service (new service, support call etc), after the experience you send them a survey and they return a response. Depending on the response you can call the customer back and try to find out the root cause of the issue, and try to resolve the issue. You then have an opportunity to work cross functionally to make those improvements that are affecting the customer experience.
I’ve got the closed loop on website change requests in my organisation and in the last week have made the following changes based on client responses:
- Process Change: Updated an incorrect call center process which was missed in a recent organisation change in another business unit
- Product Change: Affected the priorities of our product development plan by passing the feedback to appropriate business unit
- Motivation: Was able to give praise to employees for remarkable service to the business.
What jumps off the page for me is that the feedback the customers have been providing is not relating to somebody having a bad day on the phones, but process and product issues which are otherwise outside the front line employees hands, and this cross functional feedback otherwise gets lost, or at least is only available when the Marketing department runs the yearly client satisfaction survey.
I’ve found a youtube.com clip which goes through a number of these concepts.
(Deborah Eastman – Cheif Marketing Officer Satmetrix Systems)