Why Measuring Employee Experience Builds a Better Customer Experience

To better understand how to improve customer experience, companies need to harness the positive effects of employee experience. This starts with accurately measuring employees’ true feelings about their roles and the overall workplace. From there, a business can develop an actionable EX index and use it to focus their resources and drive impactful change. 

Customer experience (CX) is often driven by one seemingly universal edict: The customer is always right. But forward-thinking companies are gathering data about what actually pleases customers—and it turns out employees’ own happiness is an integral factor.

InMoment’s own CX Trends research found employees are the single largest factor in making or breaking the customer experience. The data shows a positive link between employee experience (EX) and a great customer experience, in addition to significant financial gains like increased sales and the ability to maximize business performance. In fact, companies in the top quartile for employee experience see triple the return on assets compared to those in the bottom quartile. 

Employees who feel engaged and valued will often remain loyal, productive members of their company. They’re also more likely to turn this positive energy toward tasks that benefit customers, whether they’re helping a shopper choose a new outfit or writing code for a customer-facing app.  

To better understand how to improve customer experience, companies need to harness the positive effects of employee experience. This starts with accurately measuring employees’ true feelings about their roles and the overall workplace. From there, a business can develop an actionable EX index and use it to focus their resources and drive impactful change. 

However, working for a company inspires emotions, purpose, and connections that can’t be measured by only asking simple questions. This means metrics like Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS), which doesn’t target these factors and instead is rooted in gauging an employee’s enthusiasm, are inherently inaccurate. The eNPS metric is also based on the misconception that people are as likely to recommend a workplace as they are to recommend a product or service; in reality, they’re notably less likely to do so.

Therefore, companies need to apply behavioral science to truly understand employee experience and employee engagement, and how it ultimately drives customer experience. We recommend measuring the following five elements, which were partly informed by a definition developed by Dr. Wilmar Schaufeli, professor of work and organizational psychology, and his colleagues.

#1: Vigor 

This is the energy an employee invests in their job, and the inspiration they draw on during tough times. Vigor measures an employee’s feelings surrounding their work rather than how they execute that work. 

#2: Absorption 

Absorption measures the way vigor appears in employees’ day-to-day work. In this sense, absorption is defined as the state of being so immersed in a task that employees have no desire to break away. 

#3: Dedication 

Dedication indicates employees’ long-term commitment and pride in their work. It shows how both emotion and action last over time. 

#4: Culture

An employee can’t sustain high levels of vigor, absorption, and dedication without a strong, positive work culture to support them. Culture isn’t just benefits and perks; it’s a sense of fitting into a larger, more meaningful whole. 

#5: Orientation Toward the Customer

A great employee experience does more than keep employees happy: It drives meaningful results for the customer. Companies should check in to make sure employees are directing their energy toward this key goal and others that are relevant and strategic to the brand.

When it comes to employee experience, employee engagement is only part of the story. That’s why, to gain actionable insights and improve customer experience, companies should measure external factors that drive employee behavior, as well as employee experience’s impact on customer experience at their specific company. Are employees directing their vigor at serving clients or impressing their managers? The answer matters to your long-term customer experience—and long-term success.

Learn more about the specific questions you should be asking your employees in this featured article!

Employers know that hiring individuals who are a good fit is important to the company’s ultimate success, but not everyone recognizes that hiring is just the beginning. In the healthcare industry in particular, where burnout rates have been increasing at alarming rates, monitoring employee sentiment and getting feedback to improve their engagement is crucial to retaining staff and delivering superior patient experience.

Understanding employee sentiment is a critical responsibility of HR, especially in healthcare

Engaged employees feel internal motivation to go above and beyond the call of duty for patients. For example, an engaged food service worker in a hospital will feel motivated to make sure food is delivered hot. When employees feel more connected to their jobs, they will go the extra mile to provide great quality care and research backs that up.

Keeping health professionals engaged has been shown to have positive impact on:

  • Patient satisfaction
  • Employee Turnover and Absenteeism
  • Patient Loyalty and Advocacy
  • Revenue

Monitoring employee sentiment and making use of feedback

Employee engagement is a challenge no matter what size an organization is, but it is especially difficult and important when you’re a large healthcare company. With most large enterprise organizations, human resources has systems for gathering and monitoring employee feedback channels. But you miss out on an opportunity to improve their employee happiness and engagement if you sit on all the open-ended feedback you receive from employee surveys.

Qualitative feedback can be organized into themes using machine learning

A Fortune 100 healthcare company approached Wootric for help making their voice of employee survey program actionable. This company’s employees already respond to engagement surveys on a regular basis. This provides a score to track over time and rich open-ended feedback, ripe for analysis.

But with thousands of feedback comments waiting to be analyzed, understanding the “why” behind their employee engagement scores was difficult. In addition to that feedback, the company was seeing relevant feedback on review websites like Glassdoor and Indeed. They were interested in this data because it offered a perspective that might not be shared on their internal pulse surveys.

This is a lot of feedback to process.

The good news is, employee feedback typically clusters into topic areas. Wootric text analytics algorithms are trained to recognize, including these themes:

  • Benefits & Compensation
  • Training
  • Systems
  • Workload
  • Management (direct management and overall leadership)
  • Health/wellness

Sentiment & text analytics provide insight into survey comments

The healthcare company now receives themes and uncovered valuable insight in their Wootric dashboard. Each comment is tagging with relevant themes and each tag is assigned a sentiment (positive, negative, neutral). 

In this fictional example dashboard, the human resources team can dig into the bucket of comments associated with “systems”, which covers new technology and hardware.

The algorithms do all the tedious, normally time-consuming, work of reading qualitative feedback and organizing each comment into different buckets with tags. Our data scientists and customer success team then conduct a review of the newly structured data to ensure our client received quality, actionable insights out of the gate.  

Benefits of real-time sentiment analysis of employee feedback

We work with human resource professionals to accomplish these goals:

  • Understand what impacts employee morale

For example, sentiment analysis can help you understand the impact of a roll-out of a new software system or benefit plan. When you have the data, you can move beyond anecdotes and hunches and measure the overall impact.

  • Understand engagement issue by employee role, e.g. doctors, staff

Nurses and surgeons both care for patients, but their responsibilities and goals will be very different from a pharmacist or receptionist. Different roles all have different concerns and enabling employees is much easier when you know who needs what. Segmenting your data by roles helps human resources teams to identify role-specific problems and address different concerns.

  • Use data to guide strategic plans to improve employee satisfaction

You may be hearing feedback from people all the time about how you can improve processes, the working environment, etc, but until you’ve quantified all of that feedback, it’s just anecdotal. Human resources teams are able to prioritize projects to most effectively improve employee satisfaction. There are impactful, strategic wins that you can make hidden in the comments you receive. Be sure not to miss them!

  • Risk management & incident detection

One benefit of analyzing online reviews is that you’ll understand what influences your company’s reputation as an employer. You’ll know how you’re perceived as well as why you’re perceived that way. In addition, anonymity on these kinds of forums means that current employees may be more honest about something serious–including sexual harassment or discrimination.

For our customer, it’s not enough to be on the cutting edge of technology when it comes to medical equipment and methodology. To provide quality care, they have made employee engagement a priority. Taking a modern approach to employee feedback with text and sentiment analytics makes improving employee happiness less about sorting through a flood of data, and all about taking action.

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Customer Success teams are expanding – not just in size, but in scope. New roles are emerging as CS is maturing as a specialty, specifically roles like Customer Success Operations (CS Ops).

At early-stage startups, Customer Success Managers will find themselves covering this function, but as the company grows, it can be extremely valuable to separate this function into a dedicated role within CS to help scale up.

What does a Success Operations Manager do?

Think of “Success Operations” as a product that promises to optimize processes for its customers, i.e. the Customer Success Managers.

CS Ops managers establish a baseline of productivity using metrics like net MMR churn and how difficult it is to learn about new product features. They talk to CSMs to learn what pain points they face in their day-to-day responsibilities and observe how processes currently work.

They segment the current customer base to distribute the workload effectively among CSMs. CS Ops managers look for consistent issues across the whole Success team, break the issues down into manageable components, and create solutions with measurable results.

“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.” – Peter F. Drucker

Using the information they’ve gathered, CS Ops managers may build tools like custom dashboards, or establish automatic workflows among software platforms to make the CSM’s job easier and help them be more productive.

A CS Ops manager will “onboard” CSMs, teaching them how to use the new tools at their disposal, and check in frequently with their “customers”. In this sense, they are CSMs to the CSMs.

In short, Customer Success Operations managers are responsible for providing tactical support to the rest of the Success team, helping them improve their KPIs and their efficiency.

What does a CS Operations Manager need to know?

Customer Success Operations Managers should be familiar with:

  • Customer Relationship Management Software (e.g. Salesforce, Gainsight, Totango)
  • In-app messaging Software (e.g. Intercom)
  • Support platforms (e.g. Zendesk, FreshService)
  • Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for Customer Success

Each company will have a unique suite of different platforms that it uses, and CS Ops managers need to be quick to become fluent in most, if not all of them. This is crucial for the role since data silos are a major hindrance to organizational efficiency and detract from your customers’ experience.

Additionally, Success Operations Managers will need many of the same ‘soft skills’ that CSMs use. For example, CS Ops managers need to be able to actively listen to the struggles of the CSMs to come up with valuable solutions.

What does this role look like in real life?

For Feedvisor Customer Success Operations Manager Shachar Avrahami, he came into the company as the first “Professional Services team member.” As the team grew from a one-man operation to a multi-person team (and the company scaled up), Shachar’s manager asked him to create his own role – Customer Success Operations Manager, “and I became the first person to assume this new position and help define it.”

He says, “I am the owner of our team’s processes on a macro level, making sure all teams are aligned with the strategy for each part of the customer’s journey.”

How do you know if you need a Success Operations Manager?

Giving a concrete number at which you need to hire a CS Ops manager is difficult. It depends on the capacity of your current CSM team. As a rule of thumb, you will want to look into hiring a Success Operations manager after you’ve hired your fourth or fifth CSM.

For some organizations, the new role may be an internal promotion of a CSM. For other companies, it may be wise to bring in an individual with experience in a ‘project manager’-like position to help streamline Customer Success processes, aligning everyone under the common vision that is handed down from the C-suite and creating a more consistent experience for customers.

Like Robert S. Kaplan, co-creator of The Balanced Scorecard, says, “consistent alignment of capabilities and internal processes with the customer value proposition is the core of any strategy execution.”

How do you advocate for a CS Operations Manager role?

Understand that a CS Operations Manager’s responsibilities are nearly the same as those of a Sales Operations Manager. The justifications for the CS Ops role are similar.

The operations role increases the productivity of your customer-facing Success team members, who carry the weight of recurring revenue on their shoulders. Not only does this mean management can hire fewer individuals for the customer-facing roles, but each CSM’s key performance indicators will improve at rates that were impossible before this specialized role.

Having a CS Ops role also improves visibility into the Success team’s business outcomes, places for improvement, and what projects need to be prioritized for Customer Success.

For an excellent breakdown and comparison of the Sales and CS Ops positions, click here.

Operations For Smooth Scaling

There will always be growing pains as a start-up matures and finds success. Operations experts specialize in finding technical solutions for when people are stretched beyond their limits. Creating a Customer Success Operations position is an effective way to proactively combat capacity issues for the Success team and deliver a consistently positive experience for your customers.

Access Voice of the Customer insight in your system of record with InMoment’s native integrations, including Salesforce, Gainsight, & Totango.

Great news! Your company is growing fast.

If you are responsible for scaling the Customer Success team though, it can be daunting. You need more CSMs to support all of the new customers your Sales team is bringing in the door.

How do you recruit? Who do you hire? How can you ensure new hires succeed? What are some of the hiring pitfalls to avoid?

At the latest Customer Success Meetup in San Francisco, moderator Emilie Davis of Periscope Data asked Sabine Gillert, VP of Customer Success Operations at Jobscience, and Eddie Nguyen, VP of Customer Success at brightwheel, to share their customer success hiring expertise, and attendees were not disappointed.

Sabine and Eddie have entirely different backgrounds giving exciting, diverse perspectives as they answered questions. Eddie has a strong history of working with early-stage startups and helping them grow from a few team members to hundreds, while Sabine works with a leading SaaS business in the Salesforce ecosystem.

Traits you should look for in Customer Success candidates

The first question asked was: What are the universal traits for customer success managers to be successful in the role? This is the question most of us need to have answered as we are searching for the right person for our team. 

To start Eddie laid out four qualities he looks for, keep in mind this is for early-stage startups hiring for customer success:

Grit: The hire has to be willing to work hard as it’s sometimes necessary for a startup role.

Empathy: Both internally and externally. It makes sense that empathy is needed for customers and clients, but the internal part is an interesting tidbit to consider. No doubt there will be issues that developers, sales, or even marketing has mistakenly caused, and it won’t help to blame them, it’s much better to acknowledge a mistake, help the client, and move forward.

Learning Mindset: Managers have to be interested and willing to continue learning, especially at an early stage company, as there will continuously be changes and they will need to learn steadily.

Leadership: Sometimes customers need to be led through their issue. Other times they may expect or want too much from the company and that will need to be conveyed. There will also be times when a CSMs will need to internally advocate for a customer to management, sales, and/or marketing.

Sabine added additional skills that are important for customer success:

Listening Skills: Customers can sometimes bring their frustrations to the conversation. The manager will need to listen, identify the core problem(s) and propose solutions that will help on all levels.

Curiosity: Just as Eddie mentioned Learning, curiosity is a necessity. Managers will need to investigate issues, ask why things are the way they are, and possibly propose solutions. Customers don’t usually know what they don’t know, and further, they won’t usually give a lot of details, so the manager will have to go the extra mile in some cases.  

When pressed for attributes for building your team out and hiring to improve the team you have, our two experts suggested:

Attitude: Someone that has a great energy, that can be happy about handling issues that require going the extra mile.

Process & Data-Orientation: You’ll need someone on the team that can dig into data and find opportunities while also being specific about following procedure and sticking to policy.

How do you hire for Customer Success? 

Hiring should start long before an ad is placed. Either the company desperately needs a hire (and should have started the process weeks ago, which is standard) or they are looking ahead and know that will need to have people available as new accounts come online.

With that in mind we wanted to know how the experts handle hiring, what approach do they take?

Sabine and Eddie had very similar answers to this question. Sabine suggests knowing who you would like to hire ahead of time, and approaching them before you need them.

Eddie also starts the process before hires are needed. He begins with leveraging the people at his company for intros on Linkedin. He also throws recruiting parties to get to know prospective team members.

Like a sales process, he plants seeds, so he has someone ready when they are needed. This keeps the pipeline full and hiring easier to manage than posting an ad and hoping the right person comes along.

At the other end of hiring is firing. Sometimes we hire the wrong person for a fit on our teams, and Eddie and Sabine seem to have experience here as well. Both experts suggest breaking ties with the employee as quickly as possible; it’s never good to prolong it or start looking for other opportunities for them. Sabine further suggested that every employee has a 90 day probation period and this helps with identifying poor fits.

What is Customer Success?

This was an intriguing question to ask as it would often seem like a simple answer.  You might just jump to the conclusion that every company’s CS team would be there to help customers be successful. But, both experts had unique perspectives to share.

Sabine started with a quick question: “What does it mean to your organization?” She followed up with “What do you want customers to achieve?” and added that at her company customer success also means protecting revenue and staying focused on what you have to do to do that.

Again, Eddie had an altogether different answer from his early stage startup experience. “Customer success represents brand and voice. It’s about supporting customers, harnessing the knowledge you gain and teaching the rest of the organization. It evolves being an innovator for customers and making sure everyone gets an amazing experience.”

Two strategies for training CSMs

Once you have new employees on board, it’s time to train them for customer success within your organization. Depending on how you handle management, you’ll probably have your own way of dealing with training new hires. Sabine offers extensive training programs where hires do not talk to clients until they are confident and have gone through time being shadowed by someone with experience.

Eddie’s approach was entirely different; he puts customer success managers on the phone with clients on Day 1 to expose them to the environment and help them learn what they’ll be handling. He likes to present an environment where it’s OK to make a mistake, and the manager doesn’t have to be afraid they’ll be fired for messing up. Even in these cases, answers to support issues are usually approved by another team member before going back to the customer, so there is a failsafe in effect.

How do you retain Customer Success talent?

It’s no good getting new employees on board if you can’t keep them happy and with the company, so we wanted to see what Sabine and Eddie thought about retaining talent.

Both suggest understanding and getting to know the person and what is going on in their life. Sabine likes to give them space and flexibility to handle issues so they can give it their all at work. She says it’s best to understand they are people and that it isn’t all about salary.

Eddie added that you want to first hire who is right for the company, and find out how committed they are regarding staying with the company — what are their goals? can you help them succeed? Then understand their currency, some people are motivated by money, some want recognition, others want more trust to work on tougher projects. Find out what they like so you can give it when they perform well.

Additionally, Eddie suggested that when you ask for feedback, you should take steps to appreciate the input, and take action to make changes needed. No one will leave feedback if it isn’t acted upon.

Interesting Hiring Lessons

One of our last questions for Sabine and Eddie was about their most significant learning experiences in hiring. We all have them!

Sabine had a particularly useful one about working with mentorship/ apprentice programs. Her company took on five college students in 2016, and they thought it would be just like any hire.

They quickly realized these hires required more time, management and investment because it is so early in their careers. You have to make sure they are supervised. Recognize the investment these programs require because you’ll want to do everything you can to make them successful.

Eddie summarized his lessons by saying that up until 100 people, you do unscalable things to grow, you want effectiveness. Then you’ll start to hire for efficiency, you’ll keep giving managers customers until you hit a ceiling, and that ceiling is different for every business, but you won’t know what yours is until you get there.

In the world of Customer Success, many things are new and changing, so it’s helpful to hear from others that have been in the field for years and can share their experiences. It is clear from the approaches that Sabine and Eddie shared that different strategies can be equally successful. CS leaders who are growing there Customer Success teams must  determine what practices make the most sense for their SaaS company. Good luck to all!

Each monthly meet-up gathering in San Francisco is packed with Customer Success Managers from SaaS (Software as Service) companies who want to learn the latest insights from experienced Customer Success leaders. If you don’t live in the SF Bay Area, you can still benefit from the expertise shared at these monthly meetups.  Whenever possible, the organizers post a video of the event on their meetup page courtesy of Success.ly. The September meetup was hosted by Cloudflare

Measure and improve customer health. Sign up today for free Net Promoter Score, CSAT or Customer Effort Score feedback with InMoment.

Do you know your worth to your company? Do your bosses know? What if you had metrics that showed, in black and white, just how much value you bring to the table? What if you brought those metrics into your next performance review – you know, the one in which you ask for a raise?

Forget the “what ifs.” Let’s make this into an “if/then” scenario.

If you bring in real numbers that prove the value you bring to your company into your next review, THEN you’ll get that raise or promotion you’ve been hoping for. Numbers don’t lie. The only trick is in tracking them.

How to Get Numbers that Prove You’re Worth Every Penny of that Promotion

Measuring ROI isn’t a new concept for customer success – metrics are an integral part of the job description. Since customer success is a relatively new field, success managers are typically eager to demonstrate the value of their department to the company, which means the metrics you need most (for when you’re sitting across the table from your boss) are ones you’re probably already tracking.

So let’s talk about the best metrics to tap into.

These metrics are the common ways to measure the core work of customer success as a whole, and your worth in particular.

Activities

Your first step is simple, but it might take you a while to come up with the list. You need to quantify all of the things you do. All of the activities, the health checks, the number of companies onboarded. It’s important to know how much you actually do, even though activities can be difficult to measure in terms of impact.

Now let’s look at the classic measure of the efficacy of customer success:

Retention

This, together with New Business, is a critical number for subscription-based companies since it relates directly to profitability and growth. The problem for you is that retention is a lagging indicator. It can take a year for a company you’re nurturing to decide whether to renew their contract.

What if you want a raise the next quarter?

This is why you need leading indicators.

Leading indicators give you a sense of your ROI day-to-day and effectively predict critical, but lagging, indicators like retention and growth. Because they’re continually tracked, they can also help you position yourself for a promotion or raise sooner.

The 3 Leading Indicators You Need

1. Net Promoter Score

The most important leading indicator for customer success is Net Promoter Score. Net Promoter Score (NPS) is the quick survey that asks one very important question: “On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend this product?” Anyone who scores above an 8 is a “promoter;” those who score between 7 and 8 are “passives;” and scores lower than 7 are “detractors.”

Many companies gear up for bi-annual NPS surveys to gauge customer happiness. It’s a big production of organizing email lists, taking in responses and responding appropriately. Doing it this way is a time-consuming process that makes NPS a lagging indicator when it doesn’t need to be.

With tools like InMoment that allow success teams to conduct real-time NPS surveys every day, NPS becomes a powerful leading indicator. Customer happiness leads directly to retention. And, conducting NPS surveys on a convenient SaaS platform is a much more efficient use of time.

Two-Step-in-app-NPS-Survey

NPS is also a valuable metric for another reason – management understands it. It’s a metric that isn’t limited to one department; it’s tracked at the boardroom level. If you can say “The NPS for my account group is up by 5 points in the last six months,” it gets everyone’s attention, which isn’t always the case with more department-specific metrics.

2. Onboarding Success Rate

Your second most important leading metric is onboarding success rate.

The onboarding period is the most critical time for new customers, especially for SaaS products. It’s during this 30-90 day period that customers either find success with your product and stay, or use it once and disappear. This is also the most crucial time for up-sells. Studies have shown that customers are most receptive to upsell suggestions within this same period. Essentially, if customers derive value during onboarding, you can count on a long and profitable relationship.

Here’s how measuring onboarding success works:

Similar to after-onboarding customer success, you have to first define what behaviors correlate to onboarding failures and successes for your product. Companies like GrooveHQ send new customers a series of onboarding prompts, and they’ve noticed that free users who complete those prompts within 24 hours are almost 80% more likely to convert to paid customers than those who don’t.

Once you’ve identified your onboarding success metrics, start tracking, and put benchmarks in place.

And, finally, show your improved metrics. Even better, take the next step: correlate successful onboarding with Lifetime Value to estimate the dollars-and-cents ROI of your efforts over the long-term.

3. Customer Health

Like NPS, Customer Health is also a leading metric for retention. Unlike NPS, measuring Customer Health can be complicated because you have to decide what “health” means in the context of your business.

Whatever key performance indicators you choose, your customer health scores should be predictive of renewal and churn rates. But how they do that is up to you.

Ways to measure include:

  • Overall use of your product
  • Depth of usage (percent of product used)
  • Breadth of usage (number of people using it)
  • Customer life span
  • Customer Lifetime Value (renewals, upsells)
  • Additional training opportunities taken by client
  • Frequency of customer support tickets
  • Performance on success metrics (are they achieving their goals?)

As customer success manager, what you do has so much value. You just need the right metrics to prove it. If you’re armed with all three of these leading indicators, you’re in a strong position to ask for that raise, that promotion, even additional resources on your timetable.

Retain more customers. Sign up today for free in-app Net Promoter Score feedback with InMoment.

The name of the game is collaboration. You may have an engineer delivering excellent code, or a business development associate pursuing opportunities for long term growth. If they aren’t working collaboratively with others on the goal of providing a fantastic customer experience, they are holding the company back. Read More…

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