Correlation of Employee and Customer Engagement

I was reading an interesting book, ’Human Sigma’ and one of its rule in driving an organization to achieve high customer engagement is that employee engagement and customer engagement has to be managed together. Without needing to go into details, almost everyone would believe that high customer engagement relates to great company profits, especially in this increasingly competitive world where companies are basically selling the same products.

Having established the importance of customer engagement, we can further explore the causes of how customers get engaged when dealing with organizations. Broadly speaking, are they often engaged because of the products (functional benefit) or by service (emotional service)?

When relating this to my own 20+ years of experience as a consumer, I find that service outweighs products. Sure enough, I may be fascinated once in a while by great-tasting food or that latest technology gadget with all the great features. However, these moments of delight cannot be compared to moments where I get exceptional service, like hotel staff willing to explain the whole city to me or that service staff who constantly refills my ice water. These positive service experience delights me and gets me raving about companies to my friends.

On the flip side, I can also think about the other extreme where bad service makes me truly upset and gets me complaining to all my friends. I don’t get as upset over a product just cause it’s faulty. Sure, I may bring it for servicing and if I don’t get good service then, I may get really upset. On the other hand, if I have a faulty product and the service staff helps me to get everything working, I may still rave about the great service I received despite the initial hiccup with the faulty product.

To sum it up, great service may help companies to turnaround situations where product is bad. If service is so important, why don’t all companies make their service world-class standard, improve customer engagement and their sales will all soar? I believe a lot of leaders try to, but let’s remember that customer engagement is hard to control. Customers behave differently in different circumstances and consequently, it is not easy to define the best ways to service them.

However, I feel that customer engagement can be achieved when employees go out of their way to get things done for customers. This is where employee engagement fits in. Employees will only go out of their way to engage customers when they themselves are engaged. For example, when I receive a call to my office phone that is not meant for me, I always go out of the way to find the right contact person for the caller. After emailing relevant people to contact the customer back, I will drop a friendly SMS to notify the caller that his contact details have been forwarded to the relevant people and to call me back if no one establish any contact.

My job has totally no relation to customer service, but I am willing to spend that extra few minutes to help a person because I’m aware that as a contact point, I represent the company. There was even once that I was stuck between an unresponsive staff and a frustrated client and I simply cannot imagine how angry she will be if I just told her she got the wrong number and ask her to call the main customer line.

I’m not suggesting that companies train all their staff to be masters in facing clients, but when employees are engaged, I believe they will naturally do the right thing. They will be proud to represent their company and help in whatever way they can. Before pursuing customer engagement, companies should probably first focus on their employee engagement. Afterall, most people know the right things to do, they just don’t want to do it because it’s none of their business. However, if employees don’t take ownership and make every small part their business, companies may soon go out of business. Engaging employees is vital to organizational excellence.