So, what makes employee experience the No.1 concern in bettering customer service?Well, employees, especially the front-line staff, serve not just as a medium of engagement between the product and the customers but also represent your brand and the philosophy behind your brand – how your employees treat customers is a fair reflection of how you treat them.With that being said, what can brands do to fix the employee experience?1.

Collect Feedback Constantly“Don’t forget to survey the internal customer!

Asking for honest feedback not only creates a culture of complete transparency within the organization, but it gives employees the room to innovate and bring a fresh perspective, that of the customers’ onto the decision table, since your employees interact with them all the time.2.

Or are the working hours burning them out?

It so happens that in many workplaces, employees spend more time in the office than with their loved ones.

Virgin takes care of its employees in fine fashion.

One of the reasons is that there’s something about their personality that resonates with your brand.

There’s an underlying connection that maps you with their personality.This is one of the key ingredients to create a delighted set of customers by leveraging this connection.

This is a potential opportunity for brands to explore as they’re willing to pay a premium for customer delight.Customer Delight At The Corner StoreHave you, as a little child, been to that petty store at the corner of your street to buy candies?What makes you remember the old man in the petty store to this date?

It is very likely that the storekeeper would have, at some point, asked you a question or two about yourself; your school, some recent film that you’d seen or a cricket match.

It is simply because of the connection that happened due to things that you like.It’s about time you put yourself in the shoes of the petty shopkeeper and put your customers in yours’.

How do you initiate and build this connection?Thanks to technology, you can record and access every interaction your customer has with your brand.

As leaders, we often meet with situations where we are made to address a gathering, no matter how big or small, and say words that are powerful, inspiring and memorable.

This is as much a boon as it is a bane because you never know whose day you are making with such speeches!Using quotes, metaphors and proverbs are traditionally considered extremely positive when it comes to oratory skills & eloquence.

With such power & responsibility on your shoulders picking the right ones to fit the given context is paramount.What have proverbs got to do with NPS®?Let me explain.

In a customer-facing business, making sure that you deliver on your customers’ expectations and exceed them in time is a key differentiator.

And NPS® is a very potent tool to educate you about how your customers feel about your brand.

Unless, every employee in your organization feels the power that lies within the “Ultimate Question”, its success is not guaranteed.

But what truly differentiates your organization from the rest?Customers today are not just buying product and services, they are expecting an experience.

The service provider then asked her a series of questions to gather (again) the information which she had just given.

Of course, it smelled good, too.

She could hear the chatter and laughter going on at the reception area throughout her one-hour session.#5: Reception areaWhen the massage was over and Fenni was back in the reception area, the masseur asked what she would like to drink.

Fenni could not believe the lack of professionalism and was truly taken aback.#6: Sales consultantFinally, a sales consultant asked Fenni for feedback.

She asked the sales consultant about the brand they use and the sales consultant couldn’t answer her questions.

Research has shown that the Net Promoter Score®, also known as NPS®, acts as a growth indicator for an organization.

In fact, businesses which are leaders in the Net Promoter System grow at more than twice the rate of their competitors.

It tracks how customers spread the word about a brand to their peers, friends, and family.

The developers of the NPS say that this representation results in free word-of-mouth marketing for a business.Deploying Net Promoter SurveysSome businesses implemented Net Promoter Surveys as a way to drastically improve relationships with their customers.

It provides significant feedback – the perspective of customers – thereby empowering companies with enough data to easily track customer loyalty as a metric.

This is arguably one of the best and easiest questions to measure customer loyalty for a brand and it’s services or products.

 How to Improve Customer Service & WhyEverybody loves a smile.

Your customers are no exception.In Gregory David Roberts’ Shantaram, Karla Saaranen describes Leopold Café in Mumbai as the “best place to be treated like dirt”.

In a world filled with an assortment of stresses, people place a premium on being treated like human beings.

Fail to do that, you are doing a great deal of service to your competitor.What Poor Customer Service Leads To a).

In due course of time, your employees go to your competitor.

This is particularly dangerous because they take a great deal of competitive intelligence as they go and empower your competitor even more.Are we stating the obvious here?

What they are referring to is a mindset, a fundamental way to view the world.Mindset includes a person’s attitudes and assumptions, values, beliefs, preferences, standards, and judgments.

These familiar reference points are learned throughout our lives, and may not be easily changed.So how can we foster a better service mindset, at home, in the community, and at work?

Many leaders made the mistake of simply sending people for training and hoping to see some magical result, only to realize that the change – if any – is short lived.If you want a better service mindset to permeate your organization’s culture, then much more than training is needed; a total and enduring commitment is required.Why?Because changing mindset means showing people another point of view, sharing a different perspective, a teaching them a better way of thinking and behaving.

Show genuinely interest in what they’ve got to say, try to appreciate and enter into their world.

You can use this phenomenon to your advantage by ensuring that all employees learn the same fundamental principles of service excellence – and appreciate how each principle can be brought to action for internal and external service situations.When all employees are equipped with the same set of service principles and aligned in their thinking as a team, they will more naturally choose effective behaviors in a wide variety of service situations.

You must also provide an eco-system for service mindset to take root, ensuring that your systems, processes, and culture-building activities are aligned and reinforce one another.

Insights shine a light on hidden opportunities.

CX insights can help you connect experience to your business goals, beat the competition and deliver a consistently delightful experience to your customers.

Here are five insights that your CX platform is probably not equipped to gather (but should be)Journey-based insightsEveryone is talking about journeys.

But 99% of enterprises don’t bring those journeys into their CX programs.

It helps you understand the context around your customer’s interactions with your company.

The only way to do that is to bring your journey into your CEM so that you can coordinate activities along the journey.Journey insights move your team from running surveys to having real-time, contextual conversations with your customers.Connecting CX to ROIThink about the business insights you’re getting from your CEM today.

‘One size does not fit all.’ This holds true for clothiers and marketers alike.Every individual is unique and wants different things.

The one size fits all approach simply doesn’t work, especially when dealing with customers who come with expectations of varied levels like a color palette that pops up on Microsoft Word.

Dell, for instance, has always allowed customers to “build” their computers in accordance with their needs and preferences, Starbucks gives free coffee and goodies to customers on their birthdays, and the owner of your local convenience store knows your first name and what products you usually buy.The arrival of Web 2.0 has given marketing the extraordinary possibilities to make interaction more personalized than ever before.

Netflix suggests what movies you should consider watching.The importance of personalization has not escaped brick-and-mortar businesses too.Iconic hotel brand Ritz Carlton has implemented the Customer Loyalty Anticipation Satisfaction System (CLASS) at every hotel it operates.

Delight delivered and a lifetime of patronage achieved.Go beyond fulfilling your customers’ needs – delight them with the unexpected, or at least show them that you care for all their needs, small or large, stated or unstated.

Here’s how you could go about it.

At CloudCherry, we believe customers are our backbone and value employees and influencers who make customers their top priority.

This year, we came up with an idea to award such talented CX experts.

The CX Champion Contest was all about nominating the best CX superheroes who go above and beyond their limits to surprise the customer and make them feel happy about the brand or business.

There was a $1000 dollar cash prize along with recognition from leadership team, bragging rights for a long time and off course a special surprise worthy of a champion.

We received 100+ nominations that made us aware of real talent being recognised at organisations.

Peer-to-peer recognition is a key factor at driving motivation within a company and the CX champion contest showed us that how well people who perform are admired by others.

Be it in shaping our relationships or day-to-day brand choices, we look for a connect at some level.

They are also the ones to turn customers into loyal, lifelong evangelists.To ace customer loyalty, however, any brand requires a deep understanding of customer sentiment.

Also, given the level of subjectivity involved, the technology associated with decoding emotion has to be continuously adaptable and dynamic.And while bucketing sentiment into different themes – positive, negative and neutral – is the basic approach, it tells you very little about how customers exactly feel.

And CloudCherry’s latest predictive analytics enhancements provide companies the competitive edge to unravel customer sentiment, not just more accurately, but in real-time.Companies can now drastically reduce the time required to analyze customer feedback at scale, reveal insights and predict trends.

We believe that being proactive in understanding customers and addressing their queries is the key to creating delightful experiences.This approach has a lot to do with investing in machine learning and deep learning.

Both these technologies help crunch billions of unstructured customer feedback data across a multitude of channels, in real-time, revealing key trends, a deep understanding of customer sentiment, underlying themes and drivers of customer experience.

As more and more companies have started to enter marketspaces around the globe, it translates to a wider range of options for customers.

If they are displeased with the products/services you are providing, they will most likely go to your competitors.

You have to take into account all the feedback customers provide, whether solicited or unsolicited.

And by listening to what they have to say, you can improve your offerings in such a way that you not only cement the loyalty of existing customers but also attract customers from competing brands through positive word-of-mouth marketing.You can derive valuable insight on your customers by getting to know what they expect from your brand, and also by asking them questions on how your competitors are any better or different.

For example, if you run a restaurant and you come to know that your competitors are doing something different that customers like, get a tangible insight from this that can directly contribute to shaping the customer experience.By listening to your customers in real-time, you will be in a position to tackle issues as soon as they rise, bring down customer churn rates, identify unhappy customers and find a way to compensate for their experience.

All this will translate to a huge ROI over time.Listening to Customers can get you UP the ladderTripAdvisor is a site built on the customer’s voice.

As of April 21, 2015, there were 595,502 posts.

Shopping is not a chore anymore.

And pretty much, almost always is considered a mood lifter.So as a retailer, the question you need to ask yourselves is, ‘are we making this mood lifting experience delightful?’If yes, do you know what the biggest contributor to providing a complete customer experience is?

It’s the feeling of empathy.Four Effective Tips To Bring Empathy Into Your Game Empathetic sales representatives add that competitive advantage to traditional brick and mortar retailers.

With that being said, how do you instill a sense of empathy in them?Here are some valuable tips.1.

Help customers find the products they are looking for.2.

So how do Marketers that assume CX responsibility address this with less budget without giving up important technology needed for other aspects of Marketing?

So how do business leaders start developing a customer experience strategy that keeps the engine of marketing running with the least amount of friction?

The old saying “Treat others the way you want to be treated” is cliché but true.

I would have our SDR team ask questions like this in their opening statement with people and I can’t tell you how amazing the feedback was that we got.Product – Development, design, innovation, and adaptive.

Costco cannot stream their products to clients like Netflix does, any more than The Ritz Carlton can use Costco’s strategy of bulk reductions.

Rather each tactic must concentrate on supporting the overarching strategy.Remain Focused – Consider this famous quote from Steve Jobs, “People think focus means saying Yes to those things you have got to concentrate on.

“There’s a big difference between a satisfied customer and a loyal customer.

Employees do what is measured, incentivized and celebrated.So, how do you create engaged employees who will impact customer loyalty and ultimately help boost NPS?• Instill a sense of ownership and responsibility in every employee so that they start to truly care about the ultimate business outcome – serving the customer and building loyalty.• Give your employees a strong WHY.

Even if you find that an employee is making silly mistakes, do not put him/her down in front of everyone else.

Talk to them, understand their point of view, and see how you can help them rectify the errors.• Celebrate and incentivize.

Tap into Your DetractorsAn effective NPS program helps you identify unhappy customers (detractors).

If you don’t do something about these customers, they most likely will churn, publicize their poor experiences and consequently bring down your Net Promoter Score.

It goes without saying that engaged employees not only deliver better results, but they are the roots of a world-class company culture and in turn lead to happier customers.Simply put, employee experience and engagement should precede customer experience.

Even before you start caring about your customers, you need to retrospect whether those working for you are happy and motivated first and foremost.How do you create a milieu in your organization that breeds a strong culture of employee happiness?

While there are a lot of intricate factors that go into building employee engagement, it’s hard to create a process-driven approach for it.

Because, hey, employees are, at the end of the day, as human as you or me!Emotion is what binds an employee to your organization at the grass root level.

Lively workplaces, constant recreation, enticing paychecks and stunning individual talent – you get all this right and you’d still be grappling with employee churn on a regular basis.So, what is the most important thing you need to be doing for your employees?RECOGNITION AND REWARD IS KEYWhile recognition is all about respect, rewards convey the ideology that going the extra mile will be recognized, not just in terms of providing facilites, but also in terms of incentives.

But why exactly is this system of reward and recognition important?A recent reward and recognition survey by Bamboo HR revealed that 82 percent of employees were bothered by a lack of recognition for their accomplishments.Hiring great talent is one thing.