Written by Bruce Temkin, Customer Experience Transformist & Managing Partner of Temkin Group. He also writes the popular blog Customer Experience Matters.
What would a company be like if its employees were completely disengaged drones? Think of it. Yuck! You probably would not want to be a customer and it can’t be fun to work there either. It doesn’t sound like a sustainable company.
You probably can think of some companies that appear to be like this. You may have to do business with the company, if for instance it’s the only cable provider in your area, but you probably won’t be happy about it.
Now think about companies where employees are engaged. Have you been on a Southwest Airlines flight or purchased shoes from Zappos? It’s a totally different experience. It engenders loyalty, which in turn drives long-term success.
That’s why employee engagement represents one of Temkin Group’s four customer experience (CX) core competencies, along with purposeful leadership, compelling brand values and customer connectedness. It’s nearly impossible to envision a successful operating model, especially one that differentiates on customer experience, without doing an excellent job engaging employees. As I’ve written as law #4 in my eBook: 6 Laws of Customer Experience: Unengaged Employees Don’t Create Engaged Customers.
Unfortunately, employee engagement has been the lowest-scoring CX competency for the last two years. We survey hundreds of companies using our CX competency assessment and have found that only 40% of companies are very good or okay at employee engagement. That falls below the three other CX competencies as it did in the previous year as well.
Yes, employee engagement matters and its time to do something about it.
