Engage your workforce in your customer experience strategy

Without employees, you have no customer experience.

The link between employee engagement and the customer experience has been proven. If your employees aren’t engaged with your customer efforts—or engaged overall with the organization—it will be very difficult for them to delight your customers and deliver the positive experience customers expect.

As customer experience professionals, we talk a lot about gaining buy-in and commitment from executives, but we talk a lot less about getting buy-in and commitment from employees. This is crucial to the success of your customer experience strategy.

Employees are central to the customer experience, which is vital to the success of any business. But what tools do we give to employees to prepare them to deliver a great customer experience? What training do we give them to help them understand why being customer-focused is paramount? How do we sell the concept to them?

The following points summarize several tools and approaches you can use to get—and keep— employees engaged. It should be no surprise: You really need to start from the beginning. When you’re recruiting, you can set expectations so that candidates and new employees understand what they’re signing up for, what kind of organization they’ll be working for, and what the brand represents.