Report: Employee Engagement Competency & Maturity, 2017

We just published a Temkin Group report, Employee Engagement Competency & Maturity, 2017. Here’s the executive summary of this annual review of employee engagement activities, competencies, and maturity levels for large companies:

Engaged employees are critical assets to their organization. It’s not surprising, therefore, that customer experience leaders have more engaged employees than their peers. To understand how companies are engaging their employees, we surveyed 169 large companies and compared their responses with similar studies we’ve conducted in previous years. We also asked survey respondents to complete Temkin Group’s Employee Engagement Competency & Maturity (EECM) Assessment. Highlights from our analysis of their responses include:

• Front-line employees are viewed as the most highly engaged.
• More than 70% of companies measure employee engagement at least annually, yet only 45% of executives consider taking action on the results a high priority.
• Sixty-four percent of respondents believe that their social media tools have had a positive impact on their employee engagement activities, an increase from last year.
• The top obstacle to employee engagement activities continues to be the lack of an employee engagement strategy.
• While only 23% of companies are in the top two stages of employee engagement maturity, this is still an increase from last year.
• When we compared companies with above average employee engagement maturity to those with lower maturity, we found that employee engagement leaders have better customer experience, enjoy better financial results, are more likely to take action on employee feedback, and face fewer obstacles than their counterparts with less engaged workforces.
• You can use the results of the EECM Assessment to benchmark your own employee engagement activities.

Download report for $195+

Here’s an excerpt from one of the 17 graphics that shows the maturity levels of employee engagement efforts in large companies and their effectiveness across five employee engagement competencies:

Download report for $195+

Report: Lessons in CX Excellence, 2017

We just published a Temkin Group report, Lessons in CX Excellence, 2017. The report provides insights from eight finalists in the Temkin Group’s 2016 CX Excellence Awards. The report, which has 62 pages of content, includes an appendix with the finalists’ nomination forms. This report has rich insights about both B2B and B2C customer experience.

Here’s the executive summary:

This year, we named five organizations the winners of Temkin Group’s 2016 Customer Experience Excellence Award – Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC), Century Support Services, Crowe Horwath, Oxford Properties, and VCA. This report highlights specific examples of how these companies’ customer experience (CX) efforts have created value for both their customers and for their businesses, describes winners’ best practices across the four customer experience competencies: purposeful leadership, compelling brand values, employee engagement, and customer connectedness. it includes all of the winners’ detailed nomination forms to help you collect examples and ideas to apply to your own CX efforts.

Download report for $195

Here are some highlights from the winners:

The Ultimate Customer Experience Infographic, 2016

Once again, Temkin Group is publishing a new infographic as part of our CX Day celebration.

Take a look at last year’s ultimate CX infographic.

Here are links to download different versions of the infographic:

 Infographic: in .jpg format, in .pdf format

18″ x 24″ poster: in .jpg format, in .pdf format

 

Examining Massive Decline in Customer Experience (Ratings)

In the 2016 Temkin Experience Ratings (TxR), we found that the average ratings for all 20 industries declined between 2015 and 2016 (see graphic). Here are some observations:

• Across the 20 industries, TxR dropped by an average of 5.2 points between 2015 and 2016.
• Three industries dropped by less than 4 points (banks, software, and wireless carriers), while five dropped by more than 6 points (investment firms, auto dealers, airlines, rental cars, and health plans).
• Hotels are the only industry to improve since 2014.
• Of the 12 industries that have been in the ratings for all six years, five have declined from 2011 (Internet Service Providers declined the most, down 7 points). Banks and computers improved the most since 2011 (up 5 points).
• The percentage of good and excellent companies dropped from 37% in 2015 to 18% in 2016.
• Of the 271 companies in both the 2015 and 2016 TxR, 85% declined by 1-point or more, while 6% increased by 1-point or more.
• Coventry Health Care, Con Edison, True Value, Consumers Energy, and Fox Rent A Car had the highest level of improvement in TxR between 2015 and 2016.
• Volkswagen, Fairfield Inn, Fujitsu, Commonwealth Edison, Humana, BMW dealers, and Bed, Bath & Beyond had the largest decline in TxR between 2015 and 2016.

What’s going on?

As I mentioned last year when we saw our first major decline (10 out of 19 industries dropped), the issue has to do with consumer perceptions. Companies aren’t getting worse at CX. As a matter of fact, our data shows that large companies are putting more effort into CX and are actually getting better.

This year, something else seems to have kicked in as well. It looks like there’s a widespread decline in consumer sentiment, as you’ll see when we publish this year’s Temkin Well-Being Index.

What should you do about it? 

Forget the noise about the overall decline, there’s nothing you can do about consumer attitudes. But with consumers comparing your company to the best companies across all industries, you probably need to set your CX sights a bit higher. Keeping up with mediocre peers is a losing strategy.

As the gap between customer expectations and existing CX grows, there will be more opportunities to improve CX and expand your business. But only some companies will be able to take advantage of this growing CX thirst; others will see an exodus of increasingly disappointed customers. Choose your path.

The bottom line: Hopefully consumers will feel more positive next year!

 

Report: The Federated Customer Experience Model

We published a Temkin Group report, The Federated Customer Experience Model. Here’s the executive summary:

When a company starts its customer experience (CX) journey, it often establishes a centralized team to build the necessary internal capabilities and catalyze change. However, that team’s effectiveness can be limited by a number of things, including divided attention within lines of business and a lack of resources to reach across the company. In its 2012 report, The Future of Customer Experience, Temkin Group identified the need for CX efforts to become more federated. To succeed in the long-run, companies need to focus more on embedding CX capabilities across departments and functions through a federated CX model. A federated model is a structure for enabling and coordinating a distributed set of customer experience capabilities, and it operates through centers of excellence—which spread specialized expertise beyond the boundaries of the centralized team—and enterprise CX coordination—which ensures that company-wide goals and standards are in place—and distributed CX skills and mindsets—which infuses customer-centric mindset throughout the company. These centers of excellence include deep analytics, reporting and data visualization, experience design, customer-driven process improvement, and culture change management. Enterprise CX coordination oversees enterprise CX strategy and governance, insights, metrics and reporting, standard methodologies and tools, central CX storylines, and portfolio management. And distributed CX skills and mindsets encompasses CX goal alignment, customer understanding, empathy orientation, improvement focus, and organizational awareness. The path companies take to federation can include multiple phases, such as centrally driven, cross-functional participation, distributed expertise, and federated. As their companies move down this path, successful CX professionals will be the ones who learn the business, coach and advise others, embrace empowerment, and keep learning; or, alternatively, they can choose to specialize and leave the central CX team to join one of the centers of excellence.

Download report for $195

Here are the elements of a Federated CX Model:

Download report for $195

Customer-Centric Culture Change (Video)

Our research and work with clients show that customer experience is a reflection of an organization’s culture. Any company that wants to build sustainable customer experience must build a customer-centric culture. How? By mastering Employee-Engaging Transformation.

Want to know more? Watch this short video:

The bottom line: CX success almost always requires culture change

Modernize Leadership: Shifting 8 Outdated Management Practices

Over the previous decade, I’ve had the opportunity to work with and study thousands of companies. One of the things that I’ve noticed is that the world has changed a lot, but organizational management has stayed substantially the same.

Technology has enabled entirely new practices and we’ve developed a much deeper understanding of what drives human behaviors and business success. But these new realities have not been translated into how leaders run their companies. Instead, management techniques continue to reflect outdated assumptions such as:

• Mainstream economics works on the assumption of Homo Economicus, a model of people as rational self-interest maximizers. So “agency theory” informs management that employees can’t be trusted to act on behalf of the firm and, therefore, controls must be put in place to align their efforts.
• Strategic planning cycles (annually, quarterly) have been established based on a constraint of limited data availability. When these processes and cycles were initially created, it was impractical to more frequently pull together meaningful insights about the business.
• Management focus has been driven by economists like Milton Friedman who argued that corporate officials have one core responsibility: making as much money as possible for their shareholders. But the value that a company creates comes from a combination of resources contributed by different constituencies (not just investors) who’s returns should also be maximized, especially employees who contribute their knowledge and skills.

While these underlying assumptions aren’t necessarily discussed explicitly, they frame the basic structure of today’s approach to management. Well, it’s time to Modernize Leadership. We need to redefine how we run organizations based on the realities of today, which will require more inspiring leaders in the future.

To help make the shift, I plan to write individual posts that describe eight key shifts required to modernize leadership. In those posts I’ll describe the move from:

1. Command and Control to Engage and Empower
2. Strategize and Plan to Learn and Adjust
3. Amass and Review to Detect and Disseminate
4. Measure and Track to Observe and Improve
5. Goals and Objectives to Purpose and Values
6. Problems and Solutions to Strengths and Appreciation
7. Process and Projects to Culture and Behaviors
8. Price and Features to Experience and Emotions

The bottom line: Let’s Modernize Leadership together!

Report: Lessons in CX Excellence, 2016

We just published a Temkin Group report, Lessons in CX Excellence, 2016. The report provides insights from eight finalists in the Temkin Group’s 2015 CX Excellence Awards. The report, which is 100 pages long, includes an appendix with the finalists’ nomination forms. This report has rich insights about both B2B and B2C customer experience.

Here’s the executive summary:

This year, we chose eight organizations as finalists for Temkin Group’s 2015 Customer Experience Excellence Award. The finalists for 2015 are EMC Global Services, Hagerty, InMoment, Safelite AutoGlass, SunPower, The Results Companies, Verint, and Wheaton | Bekins. This report provides specific examples describing how these companies’ CX efforts have created value for both their customers and for their businesses. We also highlight best practices across the four customer experience competencies—purposeful leadership, compelling brand values, employee engagement, and customer connectedness. We have included all of the finalists’ detailed nomination forms at the end of this report to help you compile examples and ideas to apply to your own CX efforts.

Download report for $195

Here are some highlights from the finalists:

ROI of Customer Experience (Infographic)

People always ask about the connection between customer experience and business results. Well, here’s some visual evidence of the linkage. In this infographic, we share data from the Temkin Group research report, ROI of Customer Experience 2015.

You can download (and print) this infographic in different forms:

• Infographic: infographic in pdf, infographic in png
• Poster (12″ x 24″): poster in pdf, poster in png

11 Customer Experience Trends for 2016 (The Year of Emotion)

It’s once again the time of year for me to publish my CX trends. In my post last year I named 2015 “The Year of Employee.” With this post, I’m declaring 2016 “The Year of Emotion.”

In the upcoming year, CX will continue to grow in importance for companies and an even larger number of organizations will begin their CX journeys. In this environment, we expect to see:

1. Culture Change Intensifying. Peter Drucker once said, “Culture eats strategy for lunch.” We agree and believe that customer experience is a reflection an organization’s culture and operating processes. As you can see in our video Driving CX Transformation, customer-centric culture requires mastering four CX core competencies: Purposeful Leadership, Compelling Brand Values, Employee Engagement, and Customer Connectedness. We saw a surge of interest in the topic of culture in 2015, and we expect even more executives to begin the long-term journey of culture change in 2016.
2. Effort Metric Expanding. Every interaction has three components: Success, Effort, and Emotion. Companies have started to use versions of an “effort” score as a key CX metric, because it provides a good mechanism for identifying areas of improvement. We expect this trend to intensify, and for effort to become a more mainstream topic next year. See the 2015 Temkin Effort Ratings.
3. Customer Journey Designing. Customer journey mapping has become one of the most popular CX tools as it helps provide a customer-oriented viewpoint. While many of these efforts have been heavily focused on isolated mapping events, we expect to see companies use the lessons from CJM to drive more decisions and changes across their organizations. As this happens, we recommend that more companies adopt what we call Customer Journey Thinking©.
4. Mobile, Mobile, Mobile… Continuing. Mobile continues to become a more dominant interaction channel… and through increasingly varied types of devices. In 2016, we expect more companies to get beyond the basic level of making mobile-friendly websites and launching mobile apps. Organizations will rethink their offerings and operating processes, baking in assumptions that customers and employees are continuously connected.
5. Speech Analytics Piloting. As companies get comfortable using text analytics and collecting customer insights from unstructured data, they often focus on their largest interaction dataset: contact center calls. While the technology has limited the use of speech analytics in the past, we believe 2016 will be the tipping point and expect to see a flutter of companies with speech analytics pilots.
6. Predictive Analytics Personalizing. As companies connect rich customer feedback with reams of CRM and operational data, the value of predictive modeling will rise exponentially. In 2016, we expect to see firms that have built data hubs over the last few years investing in predictive modeling and using the insights to develop a more personalized treatment of customers.
7. Metrics to Action Realigning. Voice of the customer programs (including NPS), are a mainstream component of most CX programs. But these efforts overly focus on collecting data at the expense of taking action on the insights. The problem stems from a desire to measure and track everything, which ends up consuming much of VoC teams’ capacity and budget. Next year we expect an increasing number of companies to shift their emphasis from tracking metrics to enabling action. As this occurs, they will lower their reliance on multiple-choice ratings scales to focus more on unstructured sources (comments, contact center interactions, etc.) and will increase their use of more qualitative techniques such as customer interviews and ethnography.
8. Value-as-a-Service Emerging. As consumers get comfortable with companies like Uber and AirBnB and use more iTunes apps and cloud-based applications, they are being trained to pay for things as they need them. The notion of buying something that you may or may not use in the future is becoming outdated. In 2016, we expect this consumer behavior to push more companies to break apart their offerings into bite-sized pieces. As this happens companies will need to earn loyalty more frequently and ensure that customers get value from the things that they purchase.
9. Employee CX & Empathy Training. As more companies roll out their CX change efforts, we expect to see them look for ways to train large groups of employees – to teach them basic CX concepts and to instill a sense of customer empathy. Why? Because more firms realize that sustainable CX success requires engaging employees — not simply introducing processes changes and expecting “blind” compliance. In 2016, the need for this training will grow rapidly, and CX professionals will respond by working with their training departments and outside consultants.
10. CX Profession Maturing. Customer experience has come a long way over the last few years, as CX practitioners have shared lessons learned and improved upon best practices. Nothing illustrates this maturity better than the Customer Experience Professionals Association and the increasing number of Certified Customer Experience Professionals. As this trend continues, we expect to see CX professionals become more focused on helping their organizations achieve business and brand objectives. This will change their role from experts of tools to collaborators of change.
11. Emotion Arising. Our research shows that emotion is the component of customer experience that has the largest impact on loyalty, but it is also the area where companies are least adept and often seemingly ignore. Over the past few years, neuroscience and behavioral science research has begun to fuel new techniques for affecting human emotions. In 2016, we expect to see a major jump in the number of companies that discuss, measure, and design for emotion. It will also become a hot topic at CX conferences.

The bottom line: Happy 2016, and enjoy the Year of Emotion!

Report: B2B Customer Experience Best Practices

We published a Temkin Group report, Business-to-Business (B2B) Customer Experience Best Practices. This report provides data on the state of customer experience (CX) in B2B as well as 20 CX best practices across five critical B2B processes. Here’s the executive summary:

Temkin Group research shows that although business-to-business (B2B) organizations are raising their customer experience (CX) ambitions, they still have a way to go before achieving their goals. Despite the fact that most large B2Bs have a low level of CX maturity, our research shows that 57% of them aspire to deliver industry-leading customer experience within three years. However, to improve their CX, B2Bs must master Temkin Group’s four customer experience core competencies: Purposeful Leadership, Compelling Brand Values, Employee Engagement, and Customer Connectedness. Our research uncovered 20 practices that B2Bs can emulate when applying those competencies across these five key business processes: sales and account management, implementation/project execution, support and issue resolution, partner alignment, and product management and innovation. To assess your organization’s CX maturity, use Temkin Group’s Customer Experience Competency Assessment and compare the results to data from other large B2B firms to chart your path to improvement.

Download report for $195

The report examines the state of B2B CX, including the results from large companies that completed Temkin Group’s CX Competency & Maturity Assessment:

To help B2B organizations raise their CX maturity, we identify 20 best practices for mastering Temkin Group’s four customer experience core competencies: Purposeful Leadership, Compelling Brand Values, Employee Engagement, and Customer Connectedness. These practices are aligned with five key B2B activities: sales and account management, implementation/project execution, support and issue resolution, partner alignment, and product management and innovation:

Download report for $195

The Ultimate Customer Experience Infographic, 2015

Once again, Temkin Group is publishing a new infographic for CX Day.

You can see the full infographic below. Here are links to:

• Download a printable infographic (.pdf)
• Download a printable 18″ x 24″ poster (.pdf)

eBook: 15 Tips for Engaging Employees

In honor of CX Day, Temkin Group is publishing a free eBook: 15 Tips for Engaging Employees. Here’s the executive summary: 

It is impossible for an organization to deliver a great customer experience without an engaged workforce. To help you engage your employees in your customer experience journey, we have compiled a list of 15 examples of how leading-edge companies are practicing what Temkin Group calls the “Five I’s of Employee Engagement”—Inform, Inspire, Instruct, Involve, and Incent—which you can modify and emulate at your own firm. 

Hungry for CX, Culture Eats Strategy For Lunch

Management guru Peter Drucker is credited with saying that “culture eats strategy for lunch.” I agree, especially when it comes to large organizations.

Culture can make or break the success of a company, which can be a scary phenomenon for executives. While leaders tend to be comfortable around strategy discussions, they’re often painfully awkward discussing corporate culture.

Based on our work with many organizations and our research of 100’s more, here’s a primer on corporate culture that addresses six key questions.

1) What Exactly is Organizational Culture?

All of our work in this area comes down to a key reality; culture is how employees think, believe, and act.

• Think: Employees are intellectually bought-in and understand the company’s vision and why it is important to the company. What is the company communicating?
• Believe: Employees see that leaders are truly committed to what is important to the company. What are leaders demonstrating with their behaviors?
• Act. Employees adjust their behaviors to align with what is important to the company. What do employees do when no one is looking?

Companies often focus on the think level, hoping that a barrage of communications can drive culture change. Well it can’t. You need to develop plans that deal with all three levels: Think, Believe, and Act.

2) Why is Culture So Important?

The reason that culture is so important is that it frames what people (employees) do when no one is looking. You have two choices for driving employee behaviors: 1) Prescribe all of their actions and put in place mechanisms to monitor and control them, or 2) Create a culture that encourages them to act consistently with your organization’s objectives. The first approach requires an ever-growing level of resources, and is very difficult to sustain.

Our research shows that customer experience leaders have more customer-centric and mission-centric cultures.

3) What Does Culture Look Like?

Every organization’s culture is somewhat different, but we’ve found that all cultures share some common characteristics. We developed an organizational cultural map that deines two characteristics of culture:

• Cultural Focus. Every organization has one element of its efforts that, when push comes to shove, trumps all the other elements. This is the company’s cultural focus can span from being profit-centric, where generating profits comes first, to being customer-centric, where customers come first, or mission-centric, where fulfilling the company’s mission comes first, among many others.
• Cultural Intensity. To what degree do all of your employees think, believe, and act in the same way. At the low end of the intensity scale, the culture is almost non-existent as few employees share common values. At the high end of the scale, the alignment around values is almost cult-like.

4) What Are the Elements of a Customer-Centric Culture?

Our research shows that organizations with customer-centric cultures demonstrate four core competencies: Purposeful Leadership, Compelling Brand Values, Employee Engagement, and Customer Connectedness.

5) How Customer-Centric Are Organizations?

Temkin Group has identified six stages of maturity towards a customer-centric organization. We examined results from almost 200 large companies that completed our Customer Experience Competency & Maturity Assessment and found that only 11% of companies have reached the highest two levels of maturity, Align and Embed.

6) How Can You Build A More Customer-Centric Culture?

Changing culture isn’t easy, it requires a significant and comprehensive approach that focuses on affecting the behaviors of every employee. To help companies drive the change, Temkin Group introduced an approach called Employee-Engaging Transformation, (EET), which we define as, “Aligning employee attitudes and behaviors with the organization’s desire to change.”

The bottom line:  CX success requires a strong appetite for culture

This post is part of the Customer Experience Professionals Association’s Blog Carnival “Celebrating Customer Experience.” It is part of a broader celebration of Customer Experience Day. Check out posts from other bloggers here. – See more at: http://cxday.org

Customer Experience Matters (The Video)

CX Day is less than one week away!

As part of Temkin Group’s CX Day celebration, we created a new video, Customer Experience Matters^® . It shows the value and power of customer experience. Share it, share it, share it!

The bottom line: Customer experience really matters

Customer Experience Matters is a registered trademark of Temkin Group