employee recognition

What’s Your Competitive Advantage?

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I am an avid reader. I actually set a goal on my GoodReads profile to read at least 60 books this year. This goal forces me to proactively find ways to be a life-long learner and causes me to seek more knowledge from new, and sometimes previous, sources. This morning I began reading a new book, albeit one I have read before, so to have the “Introduction to the New Edition” of this book jump right out and immediately grab my attention was something wholly unexpected.

If you haven’t read Carl Sewell’s business classic, Customers for Life: How to Turn That One-Time Buyer Into a Lifetime Customer, you definitely need to add it to your list. But for the purpose of this article, I want to focus on the “What’s New?” section of the revised addition of this book because I believe the author provides some pearls of wisdom, especially about differentiating yourself in the market. I hope to pass along the epiphany I received from Sewell’s words, which to me boiled down to him asking and answering the question: “What’s Your Competitive Advantage?”

“Customers today are better educated, have traveled more, and have been exposed to more things than ever before.” Gone are the days when a customer doesn’t already know everything about you, maybe even more than you know about yourself, and they certainly know more about you than you know about them. Because they know so much, they also expect more in today’s world. “It’s no different when it comes to [customer] service,” Sewell says. “Today’s customers have experienced better service, and they like it. They’re getting used to it. Heck, they’re even insisting on it.”

Expecting a certain standard of Customer Service has become such a fabric of our lives that many people today will often complain when they don’t receive great Customer Service. The even more unfortunate side of this issue is that many of those same customers who would complain if the service was poor, simply take it for granted when they are the beneficiary of great Customer Service. Wouldn’t it be great if every person who had a great Customer Service experience with our brand was as vocal and timely in their feedback as those who don’t hesitate tell us, and the rest of the world, how much we have disappointed them with their perceived lack of Customer Service on our part?

Sewell goes on to say, “The result is that you can no longer say to your customers, ‘Please choose between low prices and good service.’ Every single time you do, they’re going to respond, ‘I want both.'” So there you have it. ‘Good’ service is now a commodity item…it is simply the ante every company must pay to have a shot at playing the hand of keeping your existing customers and trying to gain new ones. Sewell furthers this point by bluntly advising, “When it comes to providing service, we have no choice. We either have to improve or close up shop.” So, if everyone must provide good service to their customers just to remain in business, where do we find the competitive advantage to remain relevant in the marketplace? Sewell’s next statement in the book answers that: “Our only source of competitive advantage is our people and the service they provide.” (emphasis added).

“When it comes to providing service, we have no choice. We either have to improve or close up shop.”


– Customers for Life by Carl Sewell

That’s just it. That gets to the heart of the success (or failure) of any business: did I connect in a positive way with my customers. It always, every single time, comes back to the people. Long-term business relationships are just that, they are connections and interactions between individuals, human-to-human, one at a time, over time. Cultivating a team of individual employees who truly want to help one another and to help their customers have a positive experience through interactions with your brand is the single most effective way to ensure you will continue to have customers to serve in the future. We must be willing to empathize with our customers, to adapt and grow with their changing needs, to focus more on the person rather than the policy or focus on the experience rather than the transaction.

Building a team within your brand who not only know how to care for customers (both internal and external customers) but who also genuinely want to do so is the most important investment in any company. One of my favorite quotes about investing in training and culture is something that floats around LinkedIn and the internet quite a bit. As the story goes, a CFO is worried about the rising costs of training and developing employees at the company and asks the CEO: “What if we invest in developing/training our people and they leave?” and the CEO, understanding the cost of employees who are not fully committed to the success of the business and to their customers calmly replies: “What if we don’t and they stay?” The anecdote invokes a chuckle because we all ‘know’ that training and developing culture and creating great Employee Experiences within our brand are all important things to do…and yet how many of us are actually doing so to the point where our people become our competitive advantage in the marketplace?

Employee turnover is costly; in fact it can be one of the most expensive ‘waste’ areas in an organization. But sometimes helping the wrong employees ‘turn over’ in order to find the right employees, those who further solidify your competitive advantage, is a way to build long-term health and better customer satisfaction and customer experience in your organization. Pruning the branches of a fruit tree is crucial to ensuring the best possible harvest. Keeping those branches on the tree who don’t produce the tastiest fruit only undermines the total productivity of the rest of the tree.

Strengthening the branches of your organization by cultivating the people who bring the competitive advantage of exceptional Customer Service with them to work every single day pays immense dividends over time. Helping those who don’t share that same vision and passion for your customers find other opportunities outside of your team can be an important way to further solidify your competitive advantage. Poor customer experiences caused by well-meaning employees can go viral and cause significant damage to your brand. As a prime example, just ask United Airlines about the fallout they experienced from the man who was forcibly dragged off of an oversold flight in the recent past. No one intended for that situation to escalate to the extent that it did, and yet the repercussions have been far reaching and the brand image of United Airlines was significantly tarnished. Why? Because for just a brief moment, someone (or a group of someones) failed to see the person/people involved in the situation and the policy, procedure, and protocol became more important.

Poor customer experiences caused by well-meaning employees can go viral and cause significant damage to your brand.

Companies and brands all over the world now use that instance as a Case Study to train their own people on how to resolve conflict and how to make sure to always see the individual involved as a person rather than an object in the way or hurdle to overcome. Developing an internal culture and training your employees to a standard where the people come first, both internally and externally, has an immeasurable return on investment. Ask yourself the following question when interacting with a customer: “What is the cost of not seeing the other person in this interaction…both to myself and to me/my company?” Sincerely answering that question can often provide the necessary insight in order to make the best decision for all parties involved and further cementing the positive image of your company to your most important customers; that’s Customer Experience.

Customer Experience (CX) is the new must-have title and the department in many large organizations that has gained a seat at the proverbial table…and rightfully so; a loyal customer for life is a priceless asset to any business. But to truly achieve exceptional Customer Experience (CX), we must first get our houses in order and create an internal environment and culture where the Employee Experience (EX) is front of mind so our people know we have their backs and they can in turn see the people they are serving…our customers. So join the Employee Experience (EX) movement. Let’s proactively build a competitive advantage for those companies and brands who embrace Employee Experience (EX) that drives Customer Experience (CX). This is our mission at Snowfly: To help our clients build exceptional Employee Experiences within Customer Experience: #EXinCX

For more help or further insight into how to develop the habit of seeing others as people instead of as objects, check out the Arbinger Institute and/or pick up their book, The Anatomy of Peace. The Arbinger Institute specializes in changing Mindset through the training of individuals and organizations on how to get ‘out of the boxes’ we put ourselves and others into so that we are better able to see one another as individuals who are worth serving. That kind of clarity and perspective can literally change the world for the better…and Arbinger is doing just that.

Reinventing Customer Experience Surveys

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Positive Customer Experiences Drive Loyalty

In the current marketplace, a customer not only expects to have their issue resolved by the Customer Service Representative they are interaction with, which often is interpreted as that customer being “satisfied” with the interaction with your business, there is now an additional expectation that the interaction to be pleasant and respectful, even if the customer isn’t acting in a pleasant or respectful manner. Yet when calls are “scored” for CSAT, many times the most important factor in determining a final score is if the customer is “satisfied” because the issue was resolved, which leaves much room for improvement in the survey process itself. 

I have been on phone calls many times with Customer Service professionals who have been polite, respectful, and done everything in their power to help resolve my issue, but for one reason or another, were unable to do so. Does that mean my experience with that CS Rep was a positive one or a negative one? In most cases, if I were to respond to a post-call survey using the pre-determined responses for my “satisfaction” I would likely rate that super helpful CS Rep very high on all accounts, but would still provide an overall score of “dis-satisfied” because my issue was not resolved, which reflects on that Rep’s overall CSAT score ratings.

So what can be done about scoring those interactions where the CS Rep did everything right and yet the customer is unsatisfied? Or what about those situations where the customer is “satisfied” because they were able to get their issue resolved, but the interaction was very negative or even downright nasty on the part of the CS Rep? What is the best way to capture the true spirit of the call and get an accurate CSAT score that not only represents how well the issue was resolved for the customer, but also whether or not the CS Rep was polite, pleasant, responsive, addressed my concerns, and ultimately represented your business, your brand, and themselves well during the interaction?

Using Voice Analytics to Conduct Surveys

One very effective way to address this issue is to employ Voice Analytics and allow a customer to leave a survey response that is completely open ended instead of being forced to answer pre-set questions based on a 1-5 scale that may or may not even address the real sentiment of that call. Using Voice Analytics and open-ended survey responses, you can accomplish so much more in regards to CSAT by using less of your customers’ time while better capturing the overall “satisfaction” of that customer. This can often be accomplished after the call by simply asking the customer: “Please provide any comments or feedback about your experience today.” Once the customer provides their input, which could be a few short words, or a lengthy discourse about how wonderful (or terrible) the CS Rep was or how thankful they were that the issue was resolved, but felt that the CS Rep was unsympathetic or hard to understand, you are able to collect MUCH more valuable data because the customer is not restricted to only providing input on the four areas the pre-determined survey questions were asking about.   

Our friends at Surgent Networks have been leading the technology push towards open-ended survey responses using Voice Analytics. They are revolutionizing the “Voice of the Customer” aspect of Customer Experience by literally allowing the customers to “Voice” their opinions regarding a specific interaction without the restrictions of a customer being required to respond to very specific questions in a traditional post-call survey. Customers can openly talk about what they appreciate about the brand, how their interaction made them feel special or really valued as a customer. A customer can share how they understand that the CS Rep was unable to get them the resolution they had hoped for, but they felt heard, were very grateful for the efforts of the CS Rep on their behalf, and, despite a ‘negative’ outcome of the call, leave very satisfied and likely to share their experience with others. 

Surgent Networks has written a fantastic overview of how to change your customer survey opportunities using Voice Analytics to find the real VOC and provide you insights into what your customers want to tell you vs. only collecting responses to what your survey offers the customer. To download and read the article, click here: Revolutionize the Customer Experience with Voice Analytics. 

#EXinCX   —   🙂 Employees = 🙂 Customers

In today’s ultra-competitive market, every company, every brand, must strive to have an emotional connection with their customers…especially in those instances where the customer has reached out to you specifically for help. In a nutshell, this is the essence of CX, or Customer Experience. And the only way to achieve this exceptional CX, is for your Employees to truly understand what is expected of them and then to deliver on those expectations consistently over time. This is why the focus of Snowfly in 2019 is all centered around the concept of #EXinCX – Employee Experience within Customer Experience.

Employees who are engaged and understand that their performance and behavior in their specific role with customers drives positive Customer Experiences are those employees whose value to the business is priceless and who are the ones who will drive your brand forward. So don’t rely on specific and generic questions after the call to determine if your customers are “satisfied” with you, instead, give them the chance to tell you how they REALLY feel, to tell you about anything and everything they want to say regarding your company and your brand. You will be pleasantly surprised at what your customers will tell you when given the chance to do so.

 

Snowfly Industry-Specific Article Series – Part 4: Hospitality & Travel Industry

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While working alongside one of the biggest names in the Hospitality and Travel industry for over 13 consecutive years, we have learned a few things about what makes a successful employee recognition program for folks working in Travel & Hospitality. Employee recognition within the Hospitality and Travel industry must be directly tied to the customer experience and to creating guest satisfaction during every phase of the travel experience. From the initial booking of the reservation to the check-in process to the departure and every step in-between, employees are entrusted by hospitality brands to deliver the types of experiences that will prompt a guest to become a repeat customer and ultimately an extremely loyal customer.

A recent article by Emilia Jaakkola on hotelspeak.com shared by IARE (The International Association of Reservations Executives) on Twitter provides some insight into the idea of creating memorable and emotional customer experiences with hotel guests. The main point of the article is that these connections which hotel brands are seeking to create happen one guest at a time and are ultimately facilitated by employees who create exceptional customer experiences for those guests. American author Tom Peters is credited with saying: “Why do customers switch from one store/brand to another? 14% switch because of price, 15% switch because of quality & 71% switch because of lousy customer service.” The opposite is also true, a customer/guest who has been made to feel important and valued and whose expectations were exceeded will return again and again even if price and quality factors are not equal.

In building an incentive & recognition program for employees within the Hospitality and Travel industry, rewards and recognition must be tied directly to specific aspects of the customer experience. In Customer Service Contact Centers, rewarding agents for positive call quality scores and customer satisfaction scores are paramount, but they are also just the tip of the iceberg. While this type of metric-driven incentive is the basis for any successful incentive program, attracting and retaining the best talent who will repeatedly create those meaningful customer experience connections with guests requires your incentive program to be more robust and creative.

Recognizing staff who receive positive customer feedback by name and having a platform capable of tracking and rewarding those instances reinforces to employees that creating meaningful experiences for guests is the expectation for every employee in every interaction with a guest. Offering bonuses to employees who initiate conversations that help drive customer loyalty through enrollment in guest loyalty programs, branded credit card referrals, or other partner-company loyalty programs encourages employees to get to know their guests, to listen to their needs, and to present the right up-sell opportunities and additional revenue opportunities to those guests who are interested in those services. Each of these aspects of the customer experience is an opportunity for an employee to create a meaningful emotional connection that can be worth additional revenue for the brand in the future and should be included within an incentive program as opportunities to earn additional recognition/rewards.

At the end of the day, guests in the Hospitality and Travel industry are won or lost – often for life – via the seemingly small interactions they have with the representatives of your brand – your employees. Creating a robust and flexible process for recognizing the behaviors of employees that drive guest satisfaction and loyalty is one of the best investments you can make in attracting and retaining the best talent…the type of talent that will pay huge dividends in the form of customer loyalty. Creating a transparent and easy to manage employee recognition program that empowers and rewards employees for helping guests feel a connection with your brand is as easy as connecting with Snowfly and letting us put our years of expertise to work for you. Our knowledge is real and our experience is just a connection away, just as your employees’ knowledge about and experience with your brand is only a connection away.

Snowfly Industry-Specific Article Series – Part 3: Healthcare/Health Insurance Organizations

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Snowfly’s long-standing relationships with companies within the Healthcare and Health Insurance industries offer some unique use cases for our software system. Because many of these customers require that their employee recognition opportunities are very job-specific and are often focused primarily around customer service and/or patient care feedback, Snowfly has adapted over the years to change right along with the landscape of healthcare and health insurance providers.

In these highly specialized and highly technical job roles, care must be given to ensure that the overall customer/patient experience is the paramount driver of success. Peer-to-Peer recognition is a hallmark of many of our healthcare related client programs because a work environment that fosters teamwork and ensuring that the client/patient has the best possible customer service experience is the ultimate goal. Despite Peer-to-Peer recognition being present in all of these programs, each of our client companies handles their P2P recognition process differently. Some choose to reward all those who are recognized by a peer, some choose to make each individual peer recognition an entry into an overall contest for the end of the month, quarter, or year. No matter how it is accomplished, providing co-workers with the ability to recognize one another for the daily small and simple things, or even the big unexpected things, builds cohesion and camaraderie within the workplace.

Another benefit of using the Snowfly platform for these industry clients is their ability to assign, track, and follow-up on required trainings that must be completed by employees to remain current with industry compliance standards. Because many of these individuals are working with customer/patient personal sensitive and confidential information (PPI/PCI), their employers are required to provide proof of PPI/PCI compliance and completion of mandatory training for each employee who has access to any such information. Providing a simple and effective way to communicate to the employee which training modules need to be completed, which training modules have already been completed, and rewarding employees for staying current on their training and certifications makes tracking this important data very easy. The Snowfly system also allows the employer to put the responsibility on the shoulders of the employees themselves to maintain their certifications, especially if they want to earn the incentive rewards that are tied to those behaviors.

Finally, due to the highly-skilled and often specialized positions that are filled by the employees of our customers within these industries, ensuring that a fully-staffed workforce is present for each day is critical to the success of the organization. Because one individual in a given department may not be able to fill in at another position if someone else is out unexpectedly, it becomes even more critical to ensure that daily employee attendance and schedule adherence are both emphasized. For most of these clients, that includes rewards that earned for daily/weekly/monthly attendance metrics and schedule adherence as well as being vigilant in pre-planning and receiving prior approval for any requests for vacation and/or time-off. Unexpected absences due to employees calling-in to work or simply missing their scheduled shifts without any explanation are highly disruptive and often very costly for these companies. By providing incentives to those employees who are able to accrue long periods of time without any unexpected absences or un-planned time away from work (coming into work late or needing to leave work early), the emphasis is placed upon reinforcing the desired attendance behaviors of the organization; those employees who then meet or exceed those expectations are rewarded for doing so.

Snowfly’s expertise in working with multiple healthcare/health insurance companies has grown over the years which has given us the opportunity to learn what behaviors and rewards are truly effective for this type of client. As we have proven with these industry customers, the flexibility to adapt to the changes within the industry has made Snowfly an important partner in the successful care of their customers/patients by their employees; when you demonstrate care for the well-being and success of your employees, they will in-turn exhibit that same care and concern for your customers.

Snowfly Industry-Specific Article Series – Part 2: Sales Teams/Organizations

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new age employee incentives

When working with clients whose employee rewards program is primary focused on Sales, Snowfly’s software system easily adapts to their needs and, no surprise here, most of the incentives are based upon sales commissions and or achieving specific sales goals, milestones, and/or quotas.

In sales-related jobs, it is often the top performers who are also the most highly compensated. But monetary compensation is often incorrectly seen as the only way to motivate salespeople rather than just one of several ways to engage and reward your top performing sales staff. There are really several key ways that employees are motivated and providing a combination of as many of them as possible is the surest way to keep your sales staff engaged and working hard to close more sales.

Short-term to Medium-term to Long-term goal progression.

First, the best sales teams have multiple sets of goals that provide short-term, medium-term and long-term achievement levels that provide many opportunities for a salesperson to feel a genuine sense of accomplishment at frequent intervals. Having only monthly or quarterly sales goals or quotas means you are missing out on the power of daily and weekly celebration opportunities for your sales team. Small, incremental daily rewards are so powerful in providing salespeople, especially those whose sales cycles may be months, or even years, in length.

The longer the sales cycle and the higher the value or cost of the product being sold, the more important it is for salespeople to have their steps towards closing the sale celebrated and recognized along the way. To enhance your overall sales, think about ways that you can break-up your annual or quarterly sales targets into monthly, weekly and daily goals…or maybe even down to hourly goals if appropriate. Sales SPIFs can be for very small actions taken and don’t have to be large (or even monetary) to get the attention of your sales team. Keep in mind that a sales person sees progress with every step taken is one who is more likely to get across the finish line and close more sales.

Second, you must understand and accept that while money is highly motivating to most, if not all people, it may not be the MOST important thing to many people. Rewards that are offered for sales performance should be desirable to each individual person and, ideally, each person should be able to choose the reward that is most motivating to them. Understand that being flexible in the rewards offered to your sales team provides added motivation that may not cost you anything.

In his great article on HubSpot entitled “How to Motivate your Sales Team: 8 Tried-and-True Strategies”, author Dan Tyre recounts an experience in working at Lotus where he anecdotally shares the truth that many people are highly motivated by public recognition and that a small trophy that has no value to an outsider can be an extremely effective form of motivation and reward. Other forms of non-monetary recognition include: promotion to a special project team or team lead, offering to cater lunch for a contest winner and some colleagues of their choice, giving them more freedom and autonomy to set their own hours (if appropriate), to work part of the day for them, to let them work from home, etc. In today’s day and age of “work-life-balance” being so critical to keeping the best performing employees, recognizing your employees for their performance also needs to have flexibility built into the program.

Finally, employing some aspects of competition within your sales team can also be a very effective way to engage and motivate sales people. By nature, most sales people are at least somewhat competitive, and their personality types often gravitate towards “winning” in various forms. However, don’t assume that everything must be a competition or that there always needs to be “winners” and losers. Competition can also be instituted with one person competing against his or her past performance and competition can be between different sales teams, shifts, or departments as well where the end goal is not “winning” but demonstrating overall performance improvement. These types of competitions can foster a sense of camaraderie and team-spirit when working towards a common goal and often allow for those who may not “win” as frequently as others to have more opportunities to feel successful when contributing to the overall results of their team. The concept of implementing engaging Sales “contests” is nothing new to anyone who manages a sales team, but with some small programming tweaks and with some strategy in how and when to employ sales contests, the competition aspect of the contests can be extremely effective for everyone involved.

Because of our experience in having worked with multiple sales teams across many industries, we can truthfully say that there is no one compensation package or one set of rules that will apply to every company and to every sales team. As such, it is critical that your Employee Recognition program is easily adaptable and can flex with your company’s ever-changing needs and with the various personalities found on your sales team. Snowfly continues to be successful with sales organizations of all shapes and sizes and with products ranging from hotel accommodations to fine jewelry to storage units to legal services because we help our Sales clients create the unique employee recognition program that works for their individual teams and because their programs are never static but can be adjusted on-the-fly, whenever necessary, to meet the recognition and compensation needs of their team in that moment.