Employee Experience Comes First

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There should be no doubt: companies must recognize that employees come first.

I had a great time talking about this and many other topics when I joined Mary Drumond and James Conrad with Worthix for their Voices of Customer Experience podcast.

Focusing on employees and making sure they have a great experience is something that I’ve been talking to clients and prospects about for the last 26 years. It’s nice to see that this topic is finally starting to get a bit more attention.

As I mentioned, we covered a lot of ground during the 30-minute interview. We started off touching on the 10 commandments of customer experience and the 7 deadly sins of customer experience – and why I make these religious references! All in good fun.

The gist really is that these are fundamental or foundational elements that must be in place to ensure a successful customer experience transformation. You can’t transform the experience if these commandments aren’t adhered to and the sins aren’t committed. Among the basics: executive commitment, listening to and understanding your customers, doing something with what you learn, putting employees first, and more. On this podcast, we do talk about how to get executives bought in and committed to the work that lies ahead.

From there, we talked a bit about today’s typical culture pyramid, where revenue and profits are put before employees and customers – actually, customers then employees, in that order. Sadly. We then talked about what a people-focused culture pyramid looks like, and summed it up as: focus on the people, and the numbers will come. (I’ll share my post on these two culture pyramids here soon, but if you haven’t seen what these two pyramids look like, you can learn more here.)

We also talked about

  • my five-step approach to working with clients on their CX transformations;
  • how to engage, empower, and motivate employees;
  • core values and how important they are;
  • and more!

 

I’d be honored if you’d listen to this conversation. It’s a 30-minute podcast. If you don’t have 30-minutes to listen, there’s also a transcript of our chat.

I constantly remind our employees to be afraid, to wake up every morning terrified. Not of our competition, but of our customers. Our customers have made our business what it is, they are the ones with whom we have a relationship, and they are the ones to whom we owe a great obligation. And we consider them to be loyal to us — right up until the second that someone else offers them a better service. -Jeff BezosRead the original post

Read the original post here.