GOALS
We’re tired of watching organizations hemorrhage talented people while wasting resources on employee satisfaction measures that just aren’t that important. We’re sick of seeing companies spend billions on marketing, Big Data, and other means of winning customer love and loyalty while ignoring what makes a great Customer Experience (CX): the EX. It’s time for all that to change.
Relying on plenty of real-world examples and lots of our own data, we explain the three components of a transformative EX in detail. In the process, we’re going to reveal a powerful, hidden behavioral and psychological dimension to your organization that few people know about, and show you how to master it. When you understand Expectation Alignment (EA), the Contracts, and Trust, and when you possess the tools to shape and use them with intention, you’ll create a culture in which a superlative EX can take root. Do that, and MAGIC flourishes and takes care of itself – as do retention, customer satisfaction, profitability, and growth.
We have one overarching goal: stronger organizations. That means better companies, teams, hospitals, schools, churches, communities, teams, volunteer organizations.. you name it. Regardless of the scope of the organization, we want our readers to enjoy success. Not just financial success, but category-redefining, sustainable, innovative, best-company-on-the-block success. We want you to become experts in the Employee Experience and drive a new era in which employees are not simply easily replaceable labor but partners in creating something extraordinary. When you look at the organizations we feature in these chapters, you’ll see that’s precisely what some have done. They have redefined how they think about expectations and trust, what they owe their employees, and what their employees owe them.
Frankly, our goal is to give you an unfair advantage over your competition: attracting, keeping, and growing people who make your organization better and your customers happier.
Enough prelude. Let’s get busy.
Acronyms
Throughout this book, we will use a number of acronyms and abbreviations. We’ve included some of these below to give you a head start.
CX: Customer Experience
EA: Expectation Alignment
EAD: Expectation Alignment Dysfunction
ELC: Employee Life Cycle
EVP: Employee Value Proposition
EX: Employee Experience
HR: Human Resources
MAGIC: Meaning, Autonomy, Growth, Impact, Connection
MOT: Moment of Truth
PART I
Great Expectations
CHAPTER 1
You’re Digging in the Wrong Place
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
The customer. It’s any person or group receiving a service from an individual or organization. If you run a company, it’s the person buying your T-shirts, pizza, or software. In healthcare, it’s the patient. In education, it’s the student. The customer in a not-for-profit may be the child in a remote village who receives food and medical care. In any case, the customer is the reason every organization exists – the reason people have a job to come to. So why are so many organizations (and people) doing such a terrible job giving the customer a wonderful experience?
We’re not talking about you, of course. Or maybe we are. Because most organizations have the same problem: They are desperate to win their customers’ loyalty and affection, but don’t know how to do it. Bribery with discounts doesn’t work. Innovation doesn’t work, because their competitors just out-innovate them. So they spend fortunes and waste years fishing for something that does work – and usually fail.
Still, a comparatively few organizations are getting it right. They win their customers’ loyalty and affection. They build brands that seem impervious to harm. What’s their secret? It’s right in front of them, and it’s right in front of you, too. It’s your employees. They are the secret to thrilled customers who boost profits, provide referrals, and who keep coming back. The trouble is, you’re probably not treating your employees as though this were true. We’re going to show you how to change that and, in the process, change everything.
But first, it’s time for a gratuitous pop culture reference.
CX (NOT INDIANA JONES) IS KING
If you read our book MAGIC: Five Keys to Unlock the Power of Employee Engagement, you know we’re not above using examples from TV or movies to make a point. In that book, we cited the film Office Space as a memorable example of a completely disengaged workplace. At the risk of going to that particular well once too often, join us for a brief interlude in Cairo, the setting for an early part of the classic film Raiders of the Lost Ark.
In the scene, Indiana Jones and his friend Sallah have taken the golden headpiece of the Staff of Ra to a white-haired mystic, hoping he can decipher markings that will lead them to the Ark of the Covenant. When the old man translates the markings into instructions for the staff’s height, Indy and Sallah realize simultaneously that the staff the Nazis are using in their search is too long, thus giving them inaccurate information about the location of the Ark. They look at each other delightedly and in unison utter the memorable line: “They’re digging in the wrong place.”
When we began writing this book, we couldn’t get that phrase out of our heads. As we’ve watched hundreds of organizations obsess over Customer Experience (CX) and burn billions in their efforts, we couldn’t help but think “They’re digging in the wrong place.” It’s not that CX isn’t important; on the contrary, it’s absolutely crucial to profitability and growth. In fact, a 2015 report from Forrester illustrates this unambiguously3. According to the findings, a one-point improvement in an industry’s Average CX Index™ Score is worth huge revenue increases to the companies within that sector.
We’re talking about $65 million in extra annual revenue for an upscale hotel chain, $118 million for a luxury auto brand, and a whopping $175 million a year in new revenues for a wireless service provider. To drive the point home, look at Harvard Business Review’s analysis, which asserts that a 1.3 percent improvement in customer satisfaction scores equals a 0.5 percent jump in revenue.4
No wonder everybody’s talking about the Customer Experience. You probably are. Your organization might even mention your commitment to improving CX on your website or in your mission statement. It makes sense, and we agree. Your customers should be the focus of your business, because without them, you don’t have a business. Sam Walton of Walmart fame said it best: “There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.” That’s precisely the reason so many organizations are putting so much time and effort into redefining and redesigning the Customer Experience.
Despite customer satisfaction being rocket fuel for the bottom line, organizations are burning billions in fruitless efforts to create a profit-boosting CX.
YOU CAN’T GET THERE FROM HERE
Intuitively, each of us understands what it means to be disappointed by a poor Customer Experience or delighted by the employee who goes above and beyond the call. Given the potential upside, dumping man-hours and resources into CX seems like the no-brainer of all time. But is it, really? Can you engineer a superlative CX by throwing resources directly at the customer or by demanding that your downtrodden employees deliver service with a smile? Is it that simple?
Corporate leaders certainly