The Conference Board has defined engagement as "a heightened emotional connection that an employee feels for his or her organization, that influences him or her to exert greater discretionary effort to his or her work.” That definition works for us. Engagement was never set up, by any objective third party’s evaluation, specifically to optimize customer experience and customer value, while customer experience and value optimization, through employees, is precisely the premise for ambassadorship. Our framework positions employee engagement as being embedded within ambassadorship (and HR managers and execs have found that explanation acceptable); however, engagement is principally about employee happiness, alignment and productivity, with incidental impact on customer-related processes and customer behavior, while ambassadorship is principally about customer processes and behavior, with incidental impact on employee alignment and productivity.

"It will not suffice to have customers that are merely satisfied. An unhappy customer will switch. Unfortunately, a satisfied customer may also switch, on the theory that he could not lose much, and might gain."

This is a statement made close to thirty years ago by W. Edwards Deming, in his book Out of the Crisis. Though an expert in total quality processes, he well understood that it was customer experience, formed by interactions with employees, augmented by systems and processes, and supported by a company's messaging and other communication, that creates success. He concluded: "Profit in business comes from repeat customers, customers that boast about your product or service, and that bring friends with them…profit in a transaction with a customer that comes back voluntarily may be 10 times the profit realized from a customer that responds to advertising and other persuasion..."

Placing the customer first, or complete focus on customers, two of the clarion calls of customer experience optimization, have a hollow ring if strategies aren't drilled down and reduced to a point where CSRs' daily efforts can have a positive impact on customer loyalty.

Historically, most companies devote considerably more energy and resources to winning or capturing customers than they do on keeping them. The term "conquest" is a frequently used term for new customers, especially among automotive retailers.

Consultant and author Robert Tucker has stated, "Companies are often so concerned about attracting new customers that they denigrate their unique value proposition to loyal customers." They focus instead on chasing down the next sale, competing on price, and compensating employees more for winning new accounts than for keeping existing customers happy and loyal.

A multi-industry continental Europe study by Adrian Payne, professor or marketing at the University of New South Wales, showed that 80 percent of companies spend too much of their marketing budget on customer acquisition. He calls these companies "Acquirers." Parenthetically, his study found that 10 percent spend too much on retention; and 10 percent, whom he calls "Profit Maximizers," seem to get the mix right.

Why does this overemphasis and preoccupation happen? There are five reasons, according to Professor Payne:

Over the past few years, so much has changed about the way companies sell to, communicate with, market to, and maintain relations with their customers that comparing effectiveness of both media and message content is very little more than an academic exercise. These are not fleeting trends but fundamental and long-term realities.

Today, marketers must be aware that customers are so inundated and overwhelmed with messages, impressions and the availability of product and service information that they've gone, in large measure, to alternative, informal and less traditional methods of helping them decide what and where to buy. At the heart of seeking sources for decision input is trust.

More than 40 years ago, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards wrote I Can't Get No Satisfaction. Although the song was meant to be anti commercialism and anti status quo, the lyrics (ignoring the double negative) have deeper meaning for marketers. They look for good overall customer satisfaction ratings and assume that they can drive loyalty behavior with ever-higher satisfaction scores. Peter Drucker has been quoted as saying, for example: "To satisfy the customer is the mission and purpose of every business."

Yet, although it's been well proven that transactional and longer-term experience dissatisfaction can lead to customer risk and defection, trying to optimize customer satisfaction does not necessarily keep customers loyal. Is satisfaction really the right goal—one that, if achieved, will drive behavior?

The answer, for all intents and purposes, is "no." There is proof galore to support this assertion. For instance, we asked active current customers of a B2B company, those making 10 or more purchases a year, to give service quality and product quality ratings on a five-point scale of satisfaction. We also asked the same questions of formerly active frequent buyers who hadn't purchased anything from this company in the past year. Their scores were almost identical. Consider these findings.

It will not suffice to have customers that are merely satisfied. An unhappy customer will switch. Unfortunately, a satisfied customer may also switch, on the theory that he could not lose much, and might gain.
—W. Edwards Deming, from the book Out of the Crisis

Though an expert in total quality processes, W. Edwards Deming well understood that it is customer experience—formed by interactions with employees, augmented by systems and processes and supported by a company's messaging—that creates success.

No matter how trivial it may seem, every experience between your organization and your customers has the power to excite and create loyalty, commitment and advocacy. Unfortunately, each experience also has the potential to create disaffection, disloyalty, anger and even sabotage. You must fully interpret and understand the potential loyalty impact of each experience—as well as the components of each experience—to take prescriptive actions. This is especially true if the experience is identified as a contributor to customer risk and/or loss.

How much influence do your employees have on customer value perceptions and loyalty behavior through their day-to-day interactions? At Royal Bank of Canada, agents can manage and reverse service charges. And through a program called "I Make It Right," an agent who thinks that a customer was mistreated can send a gift card or fruit basket to the client.

Employees are the common denominator in optimizing the customer experience. Making the experience for customers positive and attractive at each point where the company interacts with them requires an in-depth understanding of both customer needs and how what the company currently does achieves that goal, particularly through the employees. That means that companies must understand, and leverage, the impact employees have on customer behavior.

In 2006, American Express became the first company to take on musician and activist Bono's challenge to help the international fight against AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. It introduced American Express Red, a credit card in the United Kingdom that would pay 1 percent of the credit card charges to a global fund. The donation would increase to 1.25 percent after charges exceeded £5,000 a year.

That's one example of the ways businesses are responding to how customers actually make supplier and purchase decisions in today's environment. Those of us who study loyalty behavior are finding that, when customers are considering alternative suppliers or making final purchase decisions, the intangible, emotional and relationship benefits must be actively considered. Tangible, functional and rational elements of the product or service, though also important, tend to be somewhat more one-dimensional and non-differentiating.

During his 50-year film career, John Wayne made more than 170 movies. Arguably, one of the worst was The Barbarian and the Geisha, released in 1958, in which he played Townsend Harris, the United States' first official envoy to Japan. The movie wasn't particularly memorable (although the scenery was beautiful), but it makes a critical point about the concept of ambassadorship.

Harris' specific assignment, through words and actions, was to create trust among the Japanese nobility because, at the time the movie took place (1856), Japan regarded the motives of every foreign country with fear and mistrust. So establishing and maintaining a stable, positive relationship was a formidable task.

The plot is not at all dissimilar to the relationship every company has with every customer. Providing trust and value is the dual goal of each customer-supplier interaction, and, because employees are the principal catalyst for creating and maintaining trust, their role in the linkage of value delivery to customer behavior must be better understood.

Bill Gates, often a prophet, said in Business @ The Speed of Thought (Warner Books, 1999):

The best way to put distance between you and the crowd is to do an outstanding job with information. How you gather, manage and use information will determine whether you win or lose.

He might have added, had he really understood how to create and optimize customer loyalty, that what information—particularly what customer-specific information—a company collects and how it manages, shares it and applies it to the customer will determine how successful the company can become.