Why Does the Employee’s Voice Matter So Much?

Walmart founder Sam Walton was famous for valuing the ideas of each of his employees — from baggers and clerks to stockers and janitors. He set up feedback hotlines, routinely encouraging input and engaging his team members.

Walton wanted the retail behemoth he built from the ground-up to be agile and responsive to customer needs. He knew the best way to accomplish that was to tune in to the front lines and find out directly from his employees what Walmart’s customers thought was working or what the company could do better.

Quite simply, Walton understood the incredible value of an employee’s voice. As a customer service manager for a startup or expansion stage company, are you soliciting insight from your customer service reps? You should be. They’ll know what issues your customers are facing and what features might make for a better product.

Forrester Research’s Andrew McInnes, a Customer Experience Professional, wrote a great blog post recently about the value of employee feedback as it relates to improving customer experience. He shared the example of American Express and the company’s card replacement issues.

In the past, if a customer lost a card and called to cancel it, the cancellation was final. Even if the customer found their card under their couch cushion a few hours after filing the cancellation request, they still needed to wait several days until they received a new card in the mail.

AmEx’s formal Customer Care Program (CCP) caught the problem, however. And, because the company had a structure in place for those CCP reps to report phenomena like the one described above, they were able to alert higher-ups about the problem and have the policy changed. Now, if you lose your card, you can put it on a 24-hour hold instead of canceling it right away. It seems like a rather simple change, but it’s that kind of responsiveness that customers cherish.

All too often, Customer Ingelligence Teams do not formulate their customer service strategies on employee suggestions. That’s a big mistake and a missed opportunity. It’s critical to implement a proper program that allows customer care reps to submit suggestions and thoughts through a formal process.

Here are a few reasons why:

• Smaller startup or growth stage companies tend to have smaller teams, requiring most employees to have direct interactions with customers. That connection gives them the ability to spot customer needs and issues before they arise in traditional research.

• Since employees are familiar with internal company matters, they are in a great position to recognize the sources of customer problems and complaints.

• Finally, employees have tremendous power over how they formulate processes and how their communications affect customers. Because they act as intermediaries between internal strategic decision makers and external clients, they can make quick alterations to processes that will make a much more rapid impact.

In his blog post, McInnes outlines a flowchart that describes how to incorporate employee feedback into higher level strategic decision making. That flowchart strategically positions employees in the middle because they interact with both customers and the Customer Experience Team. They receive customer feedback and combine it with their business knowledge to form their own insights. Employees then pass their insights along through the Customer Experience Team on to the Executive team.

As McInnes’ flowchart shows, it’s not horribly difficult to make employee feedback a crucial piece of your customer service program. With an organized system in place, employees can share customer issues with the right people, allowing for change that will drastically improve the overall customer experience.

A few years ago, Entrepreneur.com contributor Paul Levesque penned a simple how-to article for spectacular customer service. In the article, Levesque highlights four ways to create that service and, not surprisingly, all four involve employees in some way. As Levesque points out, it can be as simple as encouraging employees to formally submit ideas for improving customer service. Every month, managers could select one of those ideas and implement it, tracking its success and rewarding the employee if it works.

In the end, implementing a program like the ones McInnes and Levesque layout will pay massive dividends. Your customers will have better experiences and, ultimately, that will manifest itself into stronger business results.