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: The Four Customer Experience Core Competencies (Free)

If you are only going to read only one thing about customer experience, then this report is it. It’s the blueprint for building a customer-centric organization… and it’s free.

We just published a Temkin Group report, The Four CX Core Competencies. This blueprint to building a customer-centric organization is an update to our groundbreaking research that was originally published in 2010 and updated in 2013.

Temkin Group has conducted multiple large-scale studies demonstrating that customer experience (CX) is highly correlated with loyalty across many different industries, in both business-to-consumer and business-to-business environments. When customers have a good experience with a company, they are more likely to repurchase from the company, try its new offerings, and recommend it to others.

While many companies try to improve their CX by making superficial changes, Temkin Group has found that the only path to lasting differentiation and increased loyalty is to build a customer-centric culture. Temkin Group has studied hundreds of companies to uncover the difference between CX leaders and their less successful peers, and has identified four CX competencies that companies must master if they wish to build and sustain CX differentiation:

1. Purposeful Leadership: Operate consistently with a clear set of values. (see video)
2. Compelling Brand Values: Deliver on your brand promises to customers. (see video)
3. Employee Engagement: Align employees with the goals of the organization. (see video)
4. Customer Connectedness: Infuse customer insight across the organization. (see video)

Download report for FREE

This whiteboard video describes the Four CX Core Competencies:

Here are the best practices described in the report:

Download report for FREE

Report: 2017 Temkin Experience Ratings, UK

We just published a Temkin Group report, 2017 Temkin Experience Ratings, UK. This is the same customer experience benchmark that we’ve been publishing for U.S. firms over the past seven years.

The UK Temkin Experience Ratings is a cross-industry, open-standard benchmark of customer experience. To generate these scores, we asked 5,000 UK consumers to rate their recent interactions with 157 companies across 16 industries and then evaluated their experiences across three dimensions: success, effort, and emotion.

Here are some highlights from the research:

• Co-op, M&S Food, and Lidl earned highest overall ratings, while Audi, BMW, and Flybe earned the lowest.
• When we compared company ratings with their industry averages, we found that Saga, Premier Inn, Vauxhall, and Volkswagen most outperformed their peers, while Audi and Bank of Scotland fell well below their competitors.
• Take a look at a listing of all 157 companies.

Download report and dataset for $295
(Report includes an Excel file with data for all 157 companies.
Download sample dataset to see what’s included)

Here are the top and bottom companies and the industry averages in the 2017 Temkin Experience Ratings, UK:

Download report and dataset for $295
(Report includes an Excel file with data for all 157 companies.
Download sample dataset to see what’s included)

Report: Employee Engagement Benchmark Study, 2017

We just published a Temkin Group report, Employee Engagement Benchmark Study, 2017. This is the sixth year that we’ve published the benchmark of U.S. employees. The research is based on an online survey on Q3 2016. (Take a look at our Employee Engagement Resource Page).

For the sixth year in a row, Temkin Group used the Temkin Employee Engagement Index to analyze the engagement levels of more than 5,000 U.S. employees. We found that:

• Sixty-three percent of U.S. employees are “highly” or “moderately” engaged – the highest level we’ve seen in the six years we’ve conducted this study.
• Companies that outperform their competitors in both financial results and customer experience have more engaged workers.
• Compared to disengaged employees, highly engaged employees are almost five times more likely to recommend the company’s products and services, they are over four times more likely to do something that is good, yet unexpected, for the company, they are three times more likely to stay late at work if something need to be done, and they are over five times more likely to recommend an improvement at the company.
• Companies with 501 to 1,000 employees have the highest percentage of engaged employees, while companies with 10,000 or more employees have the lowest.
• On an individual level, our research shows that the most highly engaged employees tend to be those who regularly interact with customers, who are highly educated, who earn a high income, and who are executives.
• Forty-nine percent of construction employees are highly engaged, the highest level of any industry. At the other end of the spectrum, only 20% of employees in public administration are highly engaged.
• Given the significant value of engaged employees, we recommend that companies improve engagement levels by mastering our Five I’s of Employee Engagement: Inform, Inspire, Instruct, Involve, and Incent.

Download report for $195

Here’s what we found when we examined year-over-year results for the Temkin Employee Engagement Index:

Download report for $195

Here are previous employee engagement benchmark studies: 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012.

Report: Engaging A Tethered Workforce

We just published a Temkin Group report, Engaging A Tethered Workforce.  Here’s the executive summary:

Companies across a number of industries create and deliver customer experiences (CX) through a combination of traditional employees and other workers who they do not directly control – such as contractors or employees of channel partners or outsourcing partners. Despite not being directly employed by the company, these other workers – who make up what Temkin Group calls a “tethered workforce” – still play a critical role in delivering experiences that represent the company’s brand. However, tethered workers differ from typical full-time, corporate employees in ways that pose challenges to brands’ efforts to align these workers with their customer experience goals and objectives. In this report, we examine how brands are tapping into these tethered employees. Here are some highlights:

• Companies must manage three connections: 1) Between themselves and their partners that employ the tethered workers, 2) Between their partners and the tethered employees, and 3) Between themselves and the tethered workers.
• We share over 30 examples of best practices from across Temkin Group’s Five I’s of Employee Engagement: Inform, Inspire, Instruct, Involve, and Incent.
• We offer brands a blueprint for engaging tethered workers with key things to think about across the three connections of tethered workforces.

Download report for $195

Here are the 17 best practices described in the report:

Download report for $195

Report: Translating Brand Promises into Employee Behaviors

We just published a Temkin Group report, Translating Brand Promises into Employee Behaviors. Here’s the executive summary:

Temkin Group has found that the companies that deliver great customer experience use their brand as a blueprint for how they treat customers, which is why Compelling Brand Values is one of our four customer experience core competencies. Too often organizations put a lot of energy into communicating the brand externally, only to fall short on connecting employees to their role in keeping brand promises. And when employees aren’t connected to these promises, they tend to be less proactive, to act inconsistently, and to care less about their work. In this report, we describe three steps that companies can use to translate their brand promises into employee behaviors: Make promises, Embrace promises, and Keep promises. To illustrate this approach, we share over 20 examples of best practices from companies including Anthem, A&W Food Services of Canada, the city of Centennial, Oklahoma City Thunder, and Quest Diagnostics. To evaluate how well your organization follows this approach, use Temkin Group’s Compelling Brand Promises Assessment.

Download report for $195

Here’s are two of the 15 graphics in the report:

Download report for $195

Report: State of Employee Engagement Maturity, 2016

We just published a Temkin Group report, State of Employee Engagement Maturity, 2016. 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 for any customer experience effort. As engaged employees are critical assets, it’s not surprising our data shows that customer experience leaders have more engaged employees than their peers. To understand what companies are doing to engage their employees, we surveyed more than 150 large companies and compared their responses with similar studies we’ve conducted in previous years. We found that two-thirds of companies survey their employees at least once a year, but that less than half of executives consider it a high priority to act on the results of that survey. We used Temkin Group’s Employee Engagement Competency & Maturity (EECM) Assessment to gauge the maturity levels and efforts of these companies across our five competencies, called the “Five I’s of Employee Engagement:” Inform, Inspire, Instruct, Involve, and Incent. We found that only 12% of companies have reached the top two levels of maturity, Enhancing and Maximizing, which is a drop from 2015. The lack of a clear employee engagement strategy remains the number one obstacle that companies face. We also compared companies with above average employee engagement maturity to those with lower maturity and found that employee engagement leaders enjoy better financial results than their counterparts with less engaged workforces.

Download report for $195

Here’s one of the 17 graphics:

Here’s a link to the 2015 study.

Download report for $195

The bottom line: Companies should invest more in employee engagement.

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

Report: Employee Engagement Benchmark Study, 2016

We just published a Temkin Group report, Employee Engagement Benchmark Study, 2016. This is the fifth year that we’ve published the benchmark of U.S. employees. The research is based on an online survey on Q3 2015. (Take a look at our Employee Engagement Resource Page).

Here’s the executive summary: We used the Temkin Employee Engagement Index to analyze the engagement levels of more than 5,000 U.S. employees. We found that employee engagement has stayed relatively flat since last year, but engagement levels still vary by organization, industry, and individual. Companies with stronger financial performances and better customer experience have employees who are considerably more engaged than their peers. Our research also shows that out of all the industries, the construction sector has the highest percentage of engaged employees, while the retail sector increased the most since last year. We additionally found that companies with 501 to 1,000 employees have the highest percentage of engaged employees and companies with 10,000 or more employees have the lowest level of engagement. On an individual level, our research shows that employees who are highly educated, high-income earners, executives, male, and have very good bosses tend to be the most highly engaged. Given the significant value of engaged employees, we recommend that companies improve engagement levels by mastering our Five I’s of Employee Engagement: Inform, Inspire, Instruct, Involve, and Incent.

Download report for $195

Here’s what we found when we examined year-over-year results for the Temkin Employee Engagement Index:

Here are some other findings from the research:

Report: Benchmarking HR’s Support of CX and Employee Engagement

We published a Temkin Group report, Benchmarking HR’s Support of CX and Employee Engagement.  We surveyed 300 HR professionals from large organizations in North America and compared the results to a similar study we did in 2012. Here’s the executive summary:

Employee engagement is a critical component of customer experience (CX). To determine how effectively human resource (HR) departments support these engagement efforts, we surveyed 300 HR professionals from large companies and compared the results to a similar study we conducted in 2012. Seventy-three percent of HR professionals believe that it’s very important for their organization to become more customer-centric, but only 31% believe that HR professionals are significantly helping these efforts. The good news? That’s more than twice the level of HR support we found in 2012. Compared with 2012, companies are both measuring and acting on employee feedback more frequently, and HR professionals have more bandwidth to work on employee engagement. When we compared the companies that deliver outstanding customer experience with the companies that don’t, we found that the CX leaders have better financial performance, enjoy higher levels of engaged employees, are more customer- and mission-centric, have HR groups that are more actively involved in CX and employee engagement activities, and more frequently measure employee feedback. To improve employee engagement, companies must master the Five I’s of Employee Engagement: Inform, Inspire, Instruct, Involve and Incent.

Download report for $195

Here’s one of the 25 figures in the report:

Here are some other findings in the research:

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

Report: Creating and Sustaining a Customer-Centric Culture

We just published a Temkin Group report, Creating and Sustaining a Customer-Centric Culture. Here’s the executive summary:

Temkin Group defines culture as how employees think, believe, and act, and if an organization wants to differentiate its customer experience, it must address each one of these areas. However culture change is not easy. Culture change efforts are often impeded by common pitfalls, such as ignoring the existing culture or becoming impatient at the pace of change. To make this effort smoother, Temkin Group recommends adopting an approach we call Employee-Engaging Transformation (EET), which consists of five practices: Vision Translation, Persistent Leadership, Middle Management Activation, Grassroots Mobilization, and Captivating Communications. In this report, we’ve compiled case studies of how five organizations—Hagerty, Hilton Garden Inn, Oxford Properties, Safelite AutoGlass, and Transamerica—apply these EET practices to create and sustain their customer-centric cultures. To help your company discuss its goals around culture, use Temkin Group’s Cultural Planning Map.

Download report for $195

This graphics provides an overview of the details on how five companies are driving culture change.

Download report for $195

The bottom line: Promoters are much more valuable than detractors.

Report: Employee Engagement Competency & Maturity, 2015

We just published a Temkin Group report, Employee Engagement Competency & Maturity, 2015. 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 for any customer experience effort. Our research of more than 200 large companies shows that front-line employees are the most engaged, while back office employees are often neglected in employee engagement efforts. We also found that two-thirds of companies survey their employees at least once a year, but less than half of executives consider acting on the results as a high priority. We used Temkin Group’s Employee Engagement Competency & Maturity Assessment to gauge the maturity levels and efforts of these companies across our five competencies, called the Five I’s of Employee Engagement: Inform, Inspire, Instruct, Involve, and Incent. We found that less than one out of five companies have reached the top two levels of maturity, Enhancing and Maximizing. This percentage of very mature companies is about the same as in 2014, but the percentage of companies in the lowest two levels of maturity has dropped from 67% to 56% since last year. We also found that many companies face challenges when trying to make improvements. The lack of a clear employee engagement strategy remains the number one obstacle that’s been cited by respondents over the previous three years. We compared companies with above average employee engagement maturity with those with lower maturity and found that the leaders deliver better customer experience and also have better financial results than their counterparts.

Download report for $195

Here’s an excerpt from one of the 20 graphics:

Here are some additional highlights form the report:

• The percentage of companies in the top two stages of employee engagement maturity has stayed the same since last year (19%), but the percentage of companies in the lower two sages has declined from 67% in 2014 to 56% on 2015.
• Sixty-nine percent of large companies measure employee engagement at least annually, but only 45% of companies have executives that treat taking action on the results as a high priority.
• The most common obstacle to success identified by respondents is the lack of a clear employee engagement strategy.
• We compared companies with more mature employee engagement efforts with those that have less maturity. Seventy-two percent of the more mature companies have above average customer experience compared with 48% of the other companies.
• Seventy-five percent of the more mature companies had better financial performance than their competitors’ compared with 50% of companies with lower employee engagement maturity.
• Executives in companies with more mature employee engagement efforts are almost 3.5 times more likely to treat taking action on employee engagement studies as a high priority.
• Companies with more mature employee engagement efforts are more than twice as likely to have their customer experience and HR organizations work together on their employee engagement efforts.
• The report includes data for benchmarking your organization’s employee engagement competency and maturity levels.
• Here’s a link to the 2014 study.

Download report for $195

The bottom line: Companies should invest more in employee engagement.

Report: Activating Middle Managers to Drive CX Change

We just published a Temkin Group report, Activating Middle Managers to Drive CX Change. Here’s the executive summary:

It’s hard to get any group of employees to change their behavior when their managers are still reinforcing old processes, measurements, and beliefs. Middle managers show up in organizations under a variety of titles, but regardless of the descriptor, they are the ones who execute plans, lead teams, and direct collective efforts to produce results. Because of the importance of these responsibilities, Temkin Group made “Activating Middle Managers” a key strategy in its change model, Employee-Engaging Transformation. In this report, we examine five categories of best practices for successfully activating middle managers in organizational change efforts: Involve Middle Managers in Shaping the Change, Engage Middle Managers in Goal Setting, Train Middle Managers on Key Skills, Provide Middle Managers Tools to Engage their Teams, and Connect Middle Managers with Customers. In this report, we also describe the critical role that senior leaders must play across all of these strategies.

Download report for $195

The report contains details on 21 best practices across five categories:

Download report for $195

The bottom line: You can’t drive change without activating middle managers.

Report: Engaging Millennials in the Workplace

We just published a Temkin Group report, Engaging Millennials in the Workplace, which provides five employee engagement strategies for younger workers. Here’s the executive summary:

Common estimates predict that the Millennial generation—those born between 1980 and 2000—will make up 60% of the workforce by 2020. As with each previous generation, this group of employees brings its own set of expectations, attitudes, and approaches to the job, which creates both challenges and opportunities for the organizations that employ them. Temkin Group research found that compared to other generations, Millennials desire opportunities to learn and advance their careers as well as opportunities that allow them to be creative and work flexible hours. To engage Millennials more effectively in the workplace, companies should deploy five strategies across Temkin Group’s Five I’s of Employee Engagement. These five strategies are: Expand Job Descriptions, Create Connections, Make Work Matter, Allow For Flexibility, and Develop Millennial Leaders. We also added a checklist to help HR departments drive these five strategies across their core processes.

Download report for $195

Here’s an overview of the five strategies:

Download report for $195

The bottom line: Engaging Millennials is no longer an optional focus.