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Holtz Communications + Technology

Shel Holtz
Communicating at the Intersection of Business and Technology
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Here’s how to bring your customers to life for your employees who never see them

Here’s how to bring your customers to life for your employees who never see them

Focusing internal communications on employee engagement and the employee experience will not move the customer experience (CX) needle without also communicating with employees about customers.

That was the point of my post last week. That post covered the why bot not so much the how. To that end, here are nine ways internal communicators can have an impact on employees delivering on the Customer Experience—especially those who don’t have day-to-day interaction with customers:

Help employees visualize the Customer Journey

Customer Journey

Most employees whose jobs don’t involve customer contact have a hard time visualizing how their work affects the customer. You can help by showing employees where they fit in the customer journey. Odds are, somebody in your organization has mapped that journey. Apply your infographic or other visual skills to showing which parts of the company are involved in each of the steps along the path.

Once the visual has been created, you can craft all kinds of content to support and supplement it, from articles to videos, from GIFs to memes. You can also refer to it whenever you’re communicating other customer information.

Hold customer forums

Customer Forums

We are hard-wired for face-to-face communication. Someone (I can’t remember whom) said that any communication that isn’t face-to-face is a corruption of face-to-face communication. Any time you can put a customer in front of employees, employees will have an easier time making an emotional connection.

You probably already have town hall meetings and other in-person events, any of which would be a great opportunity to convert the intangible notion of “the customer” into a living, breathing person. However, nothing beats a forum dedicated to a customer-employee interaction.

Brown-bag lunches can be one of the best forums for putting customers in front of employees. (You might be surprised how many customers would be thrilled to come talk to employees.) Consider a mix of guests. Pharmaceutical companies, for example, should consider patients who benefit from their drugs but it’s doctors who write the prescriptions, so both would be appropriate.

Let the customer make a few opening remarks about her relationship with the company, then take questions from employees. Record the session so you can repurpose it as multiple types of content, particularly for employees who couldn’t attend the forum or work in different locations. Duplicate the forums in multiple locations with local customers.

Produce customer profiles

Customer Profiles

There are all kinds of ways to profile B2B customers. Here are four:

  • Feature stories—Approach the customer’s story the same way you might tackle the profile of executives in your own organization.
  • Create customer dossiers—A section of the intranet can contain a list of key customers. Each listing includes key information about the customer and a regularly updated set of news stories about the customer’s recent activities.
  • Curation—A curated collection of items that helps paint a complete picture of the customer.
  • Customer Q&A—Get answers to the same five or 10 questions from a different customer spokesperson each week (or month).

As for individuals—end users, that is—your marketing department may well already have developed profiles for your various categories of customers. An effort to introduce everyone to those profiles will heighten awareness of their needs and preferences. Exercise some creativity in breathing life into those profiles so employees see them as archetypes for real people whose decisions can make or break your company’s sales numbers.

Connect employees with sales reps

Sales Reps

When I worked for a pharma, I made a point of spending one day each quarter on the road with a sales rep. These reps spent their days driving from one doctor’s office to another, distributing samples, sharing promotional materials, and listening to doctors’ issues and challenges (when they were lucky enough to get to spend time one-on-one with the physician).

In the car driving from one appointment to the next, these sales reps demonstrated to me a keen understanding of the customer. Each one was loaded with ideas for improving relationships, and every one of them complained that nobody above them listened. I have heard similar complaints with sales reps at companies for which I have worked as a consultant.

Internal communications is more than the production of content. An effective internal comms function facilitates the multi-directional flow of information. (At its simplest, “communication” is an exchange of information, not the distribution of content.) There are dozens of ways to give these reps a voice that informs the general employee population as well as the decision-making leadership.

Sales reps can appear as guests at employee brown-bag forums. You can survey them and produce top 10 lists (best ways to improve customer relations, biggest customer complaints they all hear, most common praise customers have for the company, etc.). Brief video interviews.

Put on a Customer Jam

IBM Client Experience Jam

IBM popularized the idea of a “jam,” an in-person and online event in which employees share ideas for improving some aspect of the business. In each case, the company produces a list of issues or challenges along with background information employees can consume in order to better acquaint themselves with the realities of the situation. Leaders evaluate the ideas and choose those they can implement immediately, as well as those that are great ideas but need to be implemented over a longer term.

IBM’s Client Experience Jam—the prototype for conducting your own—was held in 2013, with “thousands of IBM employees (jamming) on how we create the best experiences for our clients.” As with all IBM jams (which have also covered innovation, developing great managers, and a host of other topics), a leader was assigned to each topic to collect the pre-reading material, establish the conversation channels, and guide the conversation.

You can use IBM’s InnovationJam(TM) platform for large-scale, online collaboration, or develop your own processes. Either way, conducting a jam will not only surface great ideas, it will give employees the sense that they are directly involved in improving the Customer Experience.

Surface and promote employee posts about customers

Employee Posts and Updates

If you have online employee communities—an Enterprise Social Network, an employee blogging platform, or open Slack teams, for example—odds are that employees are already writing about customers. If you worked in public relations with an external stakeholder group, you would invest time and resources monitoring what the group’s members were saying online. Few internal communicators, however, make the same effort with employees.

Once you start, you can promote posts with great ideas or insights. Publish them on the home page of the intranet, for example. Get conversations started about them. Not only will employees feel that they have a voice in the customer experience (a key driver of engagement, by the way, is employees believing they have a voice), seeing others recognized for sharing their insights will inspire employees who may have been reluctant to participate in these conversations to start sharing their own observations and inspirations.

Using a social media product, TD Bank encouraged employees to share customer stories on its intranet. Employees voted for the best stories, which were elevated to a higher position on the site. The best stories wound up being woven into the company culture, recounted in lunch rooms and corridors.

Find employees who are also customers

Employees are Also Customers

This was particularly easy at Mattel, whose employee population included plenty of parents and grandparents who bought toys for their kids and grandchildren. If you work for John Deere, can you find employees with family members who use Deere equipment? If you work for UPS or FedEx, surely you have employees who have sent or received packages. Find employees with experience as a customer and spotlight their experiences.

Publish customer comments

Dear Mattel

While working at Mattel, I was surprised to learn how many children wrote letters to the company about Mattel products. The Customer Service department shared a boxful with me. Some were charming. Some were hysterically funny. Some were touching. Not one had ever been shared with employees.

I took a small step toward fixing that by publishing a sampling of such letters in the employee magazine. It provoked the largest response we had to any communication in the four years I worked there.

Your company gets letters (or emails), too. Find channels to share them so employees can hear exactly what customers find important enough to communicate directly with the company.

Get leaders talking about customers

Get Executives talking About Customers

Employees won’t care about customers if leaders don’t make customers a priority. Counseling leaders on various ways they can ensure customers are top-of-mind. No town hall meeting should end without some discussion of customers. No executive speech should omit commentary about customers. Leader visits with customers should be covered as news. Leaders with blogs or other direct channels connecting them with employees should always report key insights after a customer meeting.

Keep employees informed about CX progress

Share Customer Initiative Updates

If your company has launched a Customer Experience initiative, it is your job to keep employees informed of progress. (Far too many initiatives are launched in companies without any follow-up to inform employees of the steps that have been taken, changes made, or successes achieved.) News about the initiative’s activities and milestones should be labeled for easy identification.

What’s your idea?

This is by no means an exhaustive list. What do you—or can you—do to bring employees closer to the customer? Leave a comment and let me know. If I get enough great ideas, I’ll share them in a follow-up post.

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