What's the Best Way To Find Out What Your Employees Know?
I once spoke one on one in person to a customer service rep, trying to find out what was going on with my online account. She told me, honestly, that a lot of other customers were complaining about the same thing and she wished the technical folks would do something about the problem. What was so unique about my experience—and why I had an "in" with the rep— was that I worked at the company. And even so, leadership was not taking the rep's knowledge into account when setting priorities.
As we continue looking at customer intelligence this month, I'm interested in how your company—or your client—has solved this problem. Do you talk to your employees? What's the best way to go about this?
Our gurus are always saying that your employees are a wealth of information. So how do you tap into that wealth?
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Malcolm Wicks
Talking and listening to employees
At the strategic level this mean sharing company strategies and goals with employees and ensuring that everyone knows how their role and performance measurement fits in the bigger picture. This creates the base environment. Then just add leadership, empowerment and good communications up and down the line and the problem is cracked.
I must admit that I've only worked for one client who has got anywhere close to this and that's Tesco. There are a few other ingredients in the secret sauce that they added too. Not everyone is like Tesco so for companies still on the journey the way to tap employees knowledge is to ask them via an employee survey. I don't mean the old fashioned HR centric type of survey that asks questions about the cafeteria, car park and company benefits either. Think of employee surveys in a similar way to customer experience surveys and focus on the business. Leave lots of space for comments on every questionaire too. Making it effective needs a strong commitment to feedback the results good and bad and to act on appropriate findings. If you can't do this don't start down this route.
Employee surveys should be managed by Marketing not HR. The results should be compared to Customer and Partner surveys results as well as the strategies of the business. Playing spot the disconnention can be interesting. I'm now spending some time in this space with clients who are starting from the business problem of getting their strategies implemented easier and increasing profitability.
Some companies have definately got the message that talking to and listen to their employees in the right way can be highly profitable.
Malcolm
Michael Lowenstein
Employee Mirroring
One method we use with great frequency, and great success, is a research approach called 'mirroring', where employees are asked to evaluate aspects of performance the way they think customers will. Very different from employee satisfaction surveys, and definitely a way to gain a unique perspective, revealing and directly involve employees in processes to optimize the customer experience.
Michael Lowenstein, PhD CMC
Vice President and Senior Consultant
Harris Interactive Loyalty
Bob Apollo
Winning Habits
We've made an attempt to formalise this in what we call our "Winning Habits" program. We use a variety of mechanisms, including 1:1 surveys and Focus Groups / Workshops to tap into what the people perceived as being "top performers" know or do that their colleagues could benefit from.
The encouraging thing is that they almost all appreciate being asked, and are often surprised that no-one has made a systematic attempt to learn from them before. We find that have an independent listener, rather than their line manager, can help as well. We also probe for the things that are holding them back - stopping them from being even more effective.
The information we glean is frequently invaluable to ramping up new hires more quickly, as well as making existing employees more productive.
One technique that we've found to be effective in terms of getting support from the interviewees to give up a slice of their productive time (particularly if marketing has a bit of a reputation for being "Ivory Tower") is to position the exercise as being for the benefit of their colleagues, rather than corporate marketing. That gets even the most lone wolf on side in no time! :-)
We've published a one page data sheet on the subject here:
http://www.inflexion-point.com/resources/Winning+Habits+Datasheet+2.0.pdf
Alan J. Zell
What's the Best Way To Find Out What Your Employees Know?
There are two different avenues to take to find out what those employees who are in contact with customers. Shop/conact them as if you were a first time caller or write them an eMail or letter under a alias. Learn what steps customers have to go through and what transpires after your request has been received. Keep smelling salts handy.
Gwynne Young
What They Don't Know
I don't know, Alan. It seems to me that you're talking about finding out what your employees don't know. I think there is an awful lot of knowledge going on at the employee level that doesn't make its way back up the chain. Customer service reps can tell you when something's going wrong because every other call is about that something. They also know when they have to tell different customers the same thing so many times that it turns into a little script they keep at their desks.
My question is: How often does their supervisor collect this information? I know we've run stories about knowledge bases (preferably dynamic), but I wonder how many companies use them. And then, if you do have a knowledge base and/or system where the customer service supervisor surveys the staff regularly for new information, how often is it that the new knowledge is transferred yet further up the line so execs can consider new products and services or merely new in-house systems and procedures to help with these things that frontline employees are tracking?
Now that's just frontline workers. As an employee for the past some-odd years, I can attest to the fact that you can learn a lot from water cooler conversations. But do executives pick up on this?
Gwynne Young, Managing Editor, CustomerThink
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