As an internal communicator, odds are you don’t get a lot of exposure to customers. The fact is, in most organizations, few employees ever interact with a customer. Even more have occasional contact. Those in routine touch with the people whose business keeps our companies afloat usually represent just a sliver of the employee population. In this installment of my series exploring a model for employee communications, we’ll dive into the Customer Experience as an IC element.

This is the latest installment in a series of posts exploring a new model of employee communication, designed to deliver measurable results that demonstrate the impact on the organization in ways that matter to leaders.

The four overlapping circles at the center of the model represent the best opportunities for employee communication to affect an organization on a day-to-day basis. This post introduces the third of these circles, the Customer Experience (CX).

As an internal communicator, odds are you don’t get a lot of exposure to customers. The fact is, in most organizations, few employees ever interact with a customer. Even more have occasional contact. Those in routine touch with the people whose business keeps our companies afloat usually represent just a sliver of the employee population.

I worked for a company president once who asked his employees, “If you don’t work with our customer, help somebody who does.” That’s pretty good advice. (If only he had any kind of framework for people to put his words into action!)

At that same company, I made a point of spending one day each quarter with a sales rep. This was a pharmaceutical company; the sales reps spent their days driving from doctor’s office to doctor’s office. A great sales call was one in which they got to sit and talk with the doctor. Because there are a lot of pharma sales reps out there, a doctor who took a meeting with every rep who came calling would have precious little time left for patients. The reps for the company where I worked built reputations based on deep knowledge of the product and professional relationships with the doctor, which upped the odds that a doctor would carve out time for them. More often than not, though, they wound up leaving samples and brochures with the receptionist and headed off to the next appointment.

During the drives between doctor’s offices, the customer rep and I would talk about what they heard from doctors. Some of it was familiar. A lot of it I had never heard before. Every sales rep offered the same explanation for why this information hadn’t reached employees. “My regional director doesn’t like passing any bad news or criticism up to his (or her) boss. The people who could do something about it never find out about it.”

I decided to circumvent the process. I began producing a series in “Insights,” the monthly employee magazine. (This was the early 1990s. We were forward-looking in our use of digital communication. We replaced our printed employee handbook with a version on a 5.25-inch floppy disk. We also produced some 3.5-inch disks to accommodate the few employees who had newer-fangled computers that used them.) The recurring column was simply called, “Customer.” It featured an interview with a doctor. There were four parts to every installment: what they liked about doing business with us, what they liked about doing business with our competitors, what they didn’t like about working with us, and what they didn’t like about working with our competitors.

The idea was simple: If you knew what the customer liked and didn’t like, you could do something about it. Even employees who never interacted directly with a customer—and that was most of them—could see where their work intersected with the customer’s experience and decide that, in order to improve that experience, they needed to stop doing X and start doing Y. If they didn’t have the authority to make that decision, they could at least recommend it to their supervisor.

Defining the Customer Experience

Customer Experience—routinely abbreviated as CX—is the cumulative results of every interaction a customer has with an organization over the course of their relationship. Not surprisingly, there’s a substantial body of literature about CX, giving us a range of data, models, and approaches for improving the customer experience. New technology has a role to play, from marketing (AI helps deliver personalized information at just the right time, for example) to ways to surprise and delight (for instance, predicting opportunities based on information housed in customer relationship management (CRM) databases).

The organization has varying levels of control over the customer experience. Crappy call centers can sour a customer in a matter of minutes, something the company can improve at multiple levels: Quick fixes include better training and changing the way call center staff performance is measured (customer satisfaction instead of how quickly they get a customer off the phone); more systemic improvements come with instilling the culture with customer-centric values. External forces also affect the CX, though, such as news reports about a reputation-threatening crisis and conversations with friends and family about their unsatisfactory encounters.

(Of course, the stronger a company’s culture and values, the less likely it is to encounter these external circumstances.)

A host of considerations influence CX. There’s the emotional angle, with each customer bringing their personal sensibilities, expectations, and experiences to the table. There’s the actual quality of the product or service, not to mention its design (which affects both aesthetics and ease-of-use) and even its packaging. There’s in-store experience, the online experience, the service and support experience. There’s even the happy surprise a customer feels on discovering a new use for a product. (Did you know that if you rub Dawn dishwashing soap over your hands and arms before you start painting and let it dry, you can wash the paint that drips on you right off when you’re done?)

Ultimately, you can boil CX down to three major components:

• The Customer Journey—A mapping exercise that plots chronologically the interactions a customer has with your brand. It is a visualization of the experience with an emphasis on those aspects of the CX over which the company has some control. There are generic versions of the Customer Journey, which is often conflated with the marketing funnel (awareness, interest, consideration, decision, retention). While the marketing funnel can serve as a good starting place, in reality, every company should map out the journeys of each of its distinct classes of customer. The journey of a B2B buyer of automotive parts won’t look anything like that of a consumer buying a new car. The resulting map will be far more detailed than the marketing funnel.
• Brand touchpoints—Each of the stops along the customer journey is a touchpoint, any time a prospect or customer encounters or interacts with your brand.
• Ecosystems—Also known as “environments,” these are the spaces in which customers experience the brand, from a retail store over which you have direct control to a discussion forum where customers talk about the brand, where control resides with the customer.

The Employee Communications Role

So far in our review of the employee communications model, we have explored culture and engagement, neither of which focus much on the customer. According to Michael Lowenstein, a CX consultant, “Typically, there is little or no mention/inclusion of ‘customer’ or ‘customer focus’ elements either in measurement or analysis of employee engagement. Though there is proof that customer experience, and resultant behavior, is impacted by engagement, it is more tangential and inferential than purposeful in nature.” In other words, the belief that happy customers are the result of happy employees may be true, but it’s not enough. Lowenstein continues, “Your employees must clearly understand their role in delivering the promise the narrative makes to the end customer. This requires multiple conversations and socialization across all business divisions and at every level, not just for customer support roles.”

One of the definitions of “brand” is a “promise,” the experience the company tells the customer they can expect to receive at every step along the journey. If employees in their day-to-day work are not aligned with the brand promise, it is less likely the company will be able to keep that promise.

Alignment is one of the five outer-ring segments of the employee communication model. It is our job to ensure behaviors and processes align with the messages the company sends about such things as the company’s core values and its business plan. If the company talks a lot about quality but rewards productivity at the expense of quality, that’s a misalignment. It’s up to us to surface these mixed messages and work with management to correct them. Ensuring that every employee delivers (in Lowenstein’s words) “the promise the narrative makes to the end customer” is equally a core internal communication concern.

Back in September 2016, I shared nine ways to bring customers to life for employees. These included customer forums, customer profiles, customer jams, sharing customer input and feedback, getting leaders to talk about customers, and sharing news and updates about the company’s CX efforts.

In each of the next three posts in this series, I will explore the three dimensions of CX—the journey, touchpoints, and ecosystems—which should make it easier to find ways to bring the EX to life in your organization and make a tangible difference in the organization’s success.

The 20th installment in the series will take a closer look at the Customer Journey and the role employees can play in making it a positive, engaging one..

The graphics for this series were created by Brian O’Mara-Croft.