In my experience with helping companies build great workplace cultures, consistently one of the biggest challenges is captivating and motivating your entire team to be customer focused — even obsessed.
Sure, in most of your high-performing companies, your sales and support teams are already there. The vast majority of your team, however, isn’t close to the customer experience, is maybe a little unclear on your company’s product and solutions pitches, and isn’t exactly sure how to sell value to your customers.
As culture change leaders in the organization, we can do better than this … and we should! We need advocates across the entire team and a motivated workforce that thinks about our customers with every value transaction they make at your enterprise.
Sprinklr’s Employee Delight Assurance Plan
A great first step to becoming customer obsessed is to activate your team in becoming employee obsessed. The research is well documented that employee delight is directly linked to customer delight, which drives stakeholder value across your various constituencies.
At Sprinklr, one of the first steps to building a customer first organization was to focus on our own employees’ happiness.
A cross-functional team built the mechanism and the process to measure employee delight across the organization through an Employee Happiness Index (EHI) score as part of our larger Employee Delight Assurance Program (EDAP). Through EDAP, which is now fully automated as a next-gen app, managers in the organization regularly meet with each employee in a 1:1 setting and ask them for a happiness rating from 1-10, with 10 being the highest level of delight.
In addition, managers capture 3 inputs that would make each particular employee happier. On a monthly basis, employees and managers work hand-in-hand to implement the 3 recommendations. The process is then repeated every month. The result? Employee delight trending upward month-after -month, and just as important, better communications between employee and manager. And that leads to greater trust and ultimately a better workplace culture. The equation is simple. Happier employees make happier customers – and in turn, happier stakeholders through every daily touchpoint.
The Gold Deck Brings Our Cultural Aspiration to Life
Once trust, communications and happiness are being addressed across your organization, you can focus on creating a captivating experience that moves all employees closer to the customer and value selling for your enterprise.
At Sprinklr, our CEO Ragy Thomas is so passionate about every aspect of the company that he stays personally involved in driving all aspects of culture. One initiative that Ragy and our Chief Marketing and Experience Officer, Grad Conn, partnered on was creating the “gold standard” for how we see the market and sell the value of Sprinklr to our customers globally.
Known as the “The Gold Deck,” Ragy and Grad spent hundreds of our hours defining and redefining the presentation and the language to accompany it. They also recorded their version of it as a learning module for the rest of us. But it wasn’t enough to share this incredible work with our sales and support teams, Ragy and Grad wanted to be sure every single employee in the company understood our customer value proposition and the market we are operating in.
So that’s what we did – activate every employee to deliver (and video record) The Gold Deck as if they were presenting to a customer. But this wasn’t some corporate drudgery exercise. We made it BIG FUN!
Every single employee (1500 people) recorded a version of the Gold Deck, and the presentations then went through a peer-review process where employees around the world were assigned, and advanced, the best video versions. Along the way, great prizes totaling more than $10,000 and company stock was granted to the best of the best!
What was most amazing was the creativity of our employees – some of whom presented The Gold Deck to their pets; Susan Kempf’s throw-back to the ‘20s with a silent-film version of the Gold Deck starring her kids and their friends; a Grammy-worthy rap song by Britt Epperson; and our winner – Ryan Chapman, an employee/pilot who delivered the presentation while flying upside down in his airplane!
So go ahead and build the foundation for customer delight, and remember that it starts with employee delight and the power that comes with captivating the imagination of every employee and unleashing their creativity!
Our Gold Deck Winners!
1st Place – Ryan Chapman; 2nd Place – Emily Sparks; 3rd Place – Joe Charnitski. Runner Ups: Todd Lemmon, Justin Garrity, Sneha Raju, Susan Kempf, Britt Epperson, Jake Trigg, Sabrina Pierce, Tye Matthews, Sarah Stidwill, Diem Doan.
We All Win
When our employees are happy and engaged, so are our customers. That’s good for each of us and for business too. In a more than a decade-long study by Watermark Consulting, customer experience leaders outperformed the broader market. Those leaders actually generated a total return 45 points higher than the S&P 500 Index.
Many factors affect a company’s bottom line, but this study helps show that over time a great customer experience helps build business value–for public and private entities alike.
That’s definitely a win for all of us.
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