This presentation was given as my Keynote address to the Incentive Marketing Association of Canada. The presentation attempts to make the case that Employee engagement drives both better customer experience and greater profit margins. What’s more, it’s essential for companies that want to sustain customer experience success over time. Customer experience — its relationship to loyalty and satisfaction and the likelihood that it will lead to future business — is now a well-established discipline. However, measuring workforce experience is more complicated because no one owns the experience from end to end. What can social media do to help?

1. Going Social...
Business Boon or Bust?
Aligning Customer Experience and
Workforce Experience
February 26, 2013

2. IDEAL STATE
Employee engagement drives customer and business
success
Sources: Hay Group, Towers Watson, Gallup, Corporate Leadership Council, BC Stats, HBR

3. What are B2B marketers expectations and current
usage of social channels?

4. 85% of business decision-makers are using social
channels
Source:
How
B2B
Marketers
Use
Social
Now,
May
13,
2013

5. Business decision makers rely on communities for
business and personal purposes
Source: Forrester - The
Social
Behaviors
Of
Your
B2B
Customers,
July
2013

6. B2B marketers are looking to social media to help build
their brands, communities and businesses

7. Companies are relying on engaged employees
to realize their business priorities. But, is the
workforce motivated and ready to deliver?

8. CURRENT STATE
Today’s workforce is feeling unfulfilled and not
appreciated by their employers
Source:
“State
Of
The
American
Workplace,”
Gallup,
2013

9. CURRENT STATE
There is a ‘chasm’ between management expectations
and employee realities
Gap between expectations vs. performance
Source:
Employee
Insights
-­‐
2013
Edelman
Annual
TrustBarometer

10. CURRENT STATE
Employees are the most trusted influencers within
organization and should become brand ambassadors
2014
Edelman
Annual
TrustBarometer
–
Global
Study

11. Through 2015, 80% of social business efforts will not
achieve their goals
Gartner Research, 2013

12. Customer Experience & Workforce Experience
Are Two Sides Of The Same Coin.

13. Customer experience design is critical to success of an
engaged workforce
1. Customer experience and workforce experience are two sides
of the same coin
2. Workforce experience Is built on engagement, productivity, and
customer impact
3. To improve workforce experience, CIOs, HR, and CMOs must
work together
Source:
Forrester
-­‐
Measure
Workforce
Experience
Through
Engagement,
May
7,
2013

14. Be Social
There is value in two-way dialogue. It brings
your organization together, provides insights, and
transforms employees from passive recipients
to active participants.

15. The “voice of the employee” feeds two key customer
experience activities
1. Improving customer experiences.
Employees can spot customer problems
and unmet needs and efficiently identify
and execute solutions.
2. Building a customer-centric culture.
Employee insight can also help build
customer-centric culture through effective
hiring, socialization, and reward and
recognition programs.

16. Customer Experience And Workforce Experience Are
Two Sides Of The Same Coin
Customers want a company to:
1. deliver value
2. be easy to do business with
3. be enjoyable to do business with
1. Engagement: willingly invests time and energy
in the success of the business
2. Productivity: convert the energy of engagement
into the productivity.
3. Impact: The positive business outcome of
engaged, productive employees is happy
customers.

17. Source: Harvard Business Review, Leadership Is a Conversation, June 2012

18. Best practices approach to workforce alignment.

19. Caterpillar has defined their customer journey and
aligned employee engagement

20. Non-financial incentives are effective motivators of
behaviour change
McKinsey Global Survey 2009 - http://bit.ly/1evBegK

21. Southwest Airlines – Heroes of the Heart

22. Planning is the critical piece to ensuring
the right business objectives, social strategy,
measurement and technology are aligned to
both the customer and employee experience.

23. Mature organizations align customer and workforce
experience to deliver optimized results
Customer Experience
Discipline
Workforce Experience
Define a clear vision of the type of
experience company must deliver to
customer.
Strategy
Practices required to define a clear vision of
the type of experience for employee and how
they intersect with the customer.
Define a clear, consistent and accurate
picture of target customers preferred
experience
Audience
Understanding
Determine the exact characteristics of
interactions that exceed customer
expectations
Design
Ongoing measurement of customer
experience across the enterprise
Develop practices to monitor and
manage customer experience quality
Develop a culture that embeds the value
of delivering a great customer experience
Measurement
Governance
Culture
Ensure extensive “listening” and employee
surveys to understand needs
Involve employees in co-creation process to
ensure their voice aligns to program
objectives
Measure interactions, volume of activity,
sentiment and alignment to customer
experience
Hold people accountable for their role in the
customer experience and create broad
awareness through cross-functional support.
Socialize staff around CX expectations and
reward behavior that drives customer
satisfaction.
Source:
How
B2B
Firms
Improve
Customer
And
Partner
Experience,
March
14,
2012

24. Define a clear planning process with a focus on customer
experience outcomes and employees will engage

25. Final Thought

26. Our workforce is more than just a collection of productive
employees, they are empowered media channels
Unengaged employees are media channels and if not energized through
recognition will negatively affect business
• The shocking reality is that, 70% of US employees remain unengaged or
even worse are actively disengaged.
What is the impact to our business and brand?
• We must recognize that the relationship between brand and audiences is
now ready to be shaped and delivered by empowered and equipped
employees.
• Ultimately, employees may become the channel through which consumers
increasingly receive branded content in the future, so we must ensure that
employees are as connected to the external message and internal purpose
of the brand.
1. IPA Effectiveness Awards 2012: The employee works – From audience and message to brand medium
2. Gallup. (2013). State of the U.S. Workplace: Employee Engagement Insights for U.S. Business Leaders.

27. Thank You!