book.chapter Defining your system

To build an engaged workforce, companies must integrate brand stewardship across all departments, ensuring every employee understands their role in delivering the branded customer experience. This involves clearly defining what it means to "live the brand," guiding employees to reflect the brand's identity and values in their actions, from customer interactions to internal decision-making. By codifying brand behaviors, companies can foster a culture where employees are engaged and connected to a larger purpose, leading to satisfied customers who enjoy a consistent experience at every touchpoint, aligning with the brand promise. Involve all employees Delivering a consistently excellent customer experience is crucial for business success, as it leads to greater revenue growth, higher customer retention, increased customer lifetime value, and the ability to charge premium prices. The rise of social media and review sites means that one bad experience can quickly damage a brand's reputation. Creating a compelling customer experience requires an orchestrated, strategic approach across the entire organization, starting with a deep understanding of customer needs, pains, behaviors, and expectations through customer journey mapping, focus groups, surveys, and analysis of feedback data. With these insights, companies can align internal priorities and processes to meet customer needs at every touchpoint. Enabling and motivating employees to deliver outstanding experiences is another key element, requiring investment in a strong employee experience through training, support, incentives, and an empowering culture. This fosters an emotional commitment to the customer and inspires discretionary effort. On the operations side, companies should aim to maximize convenience with omnichannel integration and personalize engagements, optimize digital channels, use automation to remove friction points, and act quickly on feedback to delight customers. Customer incentives that reinforce loyalty and value perceptions, such as tiered rewards programs, surprise upgrades, and exclusive perks, make customers feel special. Community building tactics can turn happy customers into brand advocates. However, when things go wrong, complaint and returns handling processes should operate with empathy, fairness, and speed to turn negatives into positives, with post-recovery surveys transforming dissatisfied customers into promoters. A compelling customer experience stems from a consumer-centric culture built on deep customer empathy. With the right vision, leadership commitment, and coordinated cross-functional efforts, companies can earn lasting customer trust and affinity by consistently wowing people at every step and delivering on brand promises. In today's experience economy, where customers expect hyper-personalized, instant, and emotionally-resonant engagements, the winners will be those that make customers feel valued, understood, and elated at each touchpoint throughout the entire lifecycle. Link happy staff and customers Employee engagement is the emotional commitment employees have to their organization and its goals, with engaged employees caring about their company and feeling their efforts contribute to its success. However, alarming data reveals that about 65% of employees are dissatisfied at work, leaving only 35% feeling actively engaged. This lack of engagement is costly, as organizations with engaged workforces grow profits three times faster and reduce turnover by 87% compared to those with disengaged employees. To improve engagement, it's crucial to help employees understand expectations, provide necessary resources, and remove obstacles. Building a culture that aligns employer and employee values can also boost engagement. Small daily efforts to nurture culture and engagement can lead to better business outcomes. The connection between employee engagement and customer experience is undeniable, with 70% of engaged employees effectively understanding and meeting customer needs, versus only 17% of disengaged workers. Satisfied employees deliver better customer service, enhancing focus, resilience, and willingness to go the extra mile, which builds brand loyalty and fuels business growth. Managers must prioritize engaging employees to better serve customers, setting clear expectations, providing resources, recognizing excellent work, and building an ethical, inclusive culture. Soliciting worker feedback helps identify engagement barriers and drive improvements. Ultimately, an engaged workforce is essential for a successful brand, as it brings its best efforts daily, drives growth through positive experiences, and generates devoted customers. The link between employee engagement, customer loyalty, and profitability is clear, and progress requires leadership buy-in and thoughtful engagement strategies tailored to company needs. Make culture visible Creating an engaged workforce is pivotal for any organization, and it starts with translating the company's mission, values, brand positioning, and guiding principles into observable employee behaviors. This transformation from invisible ideals to visible actions involves a three-step process. The first step is to define the company mindset in a clear and concise manner. Without a clearly articulated mindset, employees may act based on their own assumptions, leading to misalignment. A succinct, memorable mindset statement, such as walmart's "save people money so they live better" or apple's "think differently and positively change lives," is essential to capture the hearts and minds of employees and ensure everyone is working towards the same goal. Next, it is important to establish behaviors that reflect the desired customer experience. Without specific guidance, employees might default to behaviors that are most natural to them, which may not align with the company's brand. By clearly defining the shared mindset and translating it into consistent behaviors, a company can manage its brand effectively and outperform competitors. The final step is to deliver exceptional customer experiences. Customers' perceptions of a company are largely based on their firsthand experiences, which account for about 90 percent of their overall impression, as opposed to only 10 percent from the company's website or marketing efforts. When employees consistently provide outstanding experiences, the company thrives, as these experiences are the most effective form of marketing. Harvard business school professor john kotter has pointed out that the essence of most business challenges is changing employee behavior. Similarly, author stephen covey has emphasized the difficulty leaders face in translating corporate visions into actionable behaviors at the front-line level to achieve key objectives. A company's mindset is a powerful tool that shapes employee attitudes and actions. Leaving its influence to chance is a risk that businesses cannot afford. Engaged organizations ensure that their mindset is known by all employees, enabling them to embody and demonstrate it in their daily work. Enable cultural change Changing an organization's culture to create more engaged employees and customers is a complex task that hinges on altering behaviors sustainably. Gregg lederman emphasizes that for engaged employees to produce engaged customers, culture change is unavoidable. The process begins with managing brand-related behaviors that employees consistently exhibit. To effectively involve everyone in designing the ideal customer experience, three preliminary steps are necessary. First, define the target customer segment to provide a tailored experience. Second, identify the key touchpoints that significantly affect customer perceptions to optimize them. Third, form a cross-functional team, including frontline staff, to contribute to the experience design. After laying this foundation, a six-step process helps map the ideal experience. The initial three steps focus on the customer perspective: understanding customers' desired outcomes, identifying obstacles to the ideal experience, and creating a mindset statement for how employees should view customers. The following three steps aim to outperform competitors by drafting essential service behaviors for each touchpoint, pinpointing opportunities to exceed customer expectations, and prioritizing processes and resources for consistently exceptional experiences. Documenting the optimal customer journey for key touchpoints offers several advantages. It ensures ongoing facilitation of positive experiences, secures staff engagement, sets clear, measurable standards based on behavior, fosters differentiation, encourages viewing products and services from the customer's perspective, and highlights effective practices as a foundation for improvement. To maintain a culture that delivers branded customer experiences, management must continually remind, reinforce, and celebrate the desired behaviors beyond initial training. Introducing changes incrementally, starting with one or two high-impact touchpoints, is more effective than an immediate organization-wide overhaul.