Aimee Lucas Research – Customer Experience Matters®

Report: Infusing Culture Throughout The New Employee Journey

August 7, 2017August 7, 2017

We just published a Temkin Group report, Infusing Culture Throughout The New Employee Journey.

Here’s the executive summary:

A company’s culture reflects the attitudes and behaviors of its employees and influences almost every aspect of the employee journey and experience. However, despite its importance, many companies fail to orient new employees to their culture during onboarding. Rather than helping new hires form long-term connections with the organization and its values, companies often use this time to teach new hires about the organization’s processes. Companies instead should use their culture as a focal point during recruiting, hiring, and onboarding and then continue to emphasize it as employees acclimate to their roles. This report:

Explores how companies can align new employees with their culture.
Describes how companies can infuse culture throughout the four stages of the new hire journey: Establish Cultural Fit, Set Behavioral Expectations, Reinforce Positive Performance, and Prioritize Sustaining Culture.
Shares examples of best practices from a number of companies, including Adobe, Crowe Horwath, LexisNexis, Oxford Properties, Touchpoint Support Services, and Safelite Autoglass.
Provides a checklist companies can use to execute their culture-focused onboarding program effectively.

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Here are the best practices described in the report:

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Report: Activating Executive Commitment to CX

June 26, 2017July 7, 2017

We just published a Temkin Group report, Activating Executive Commitment to CX. Here’s the executive summary:

Organizations that want to drive sustainable customer experience (CX) improvements need to have senior executives who are committed to propel change throughout the entire journey. Successful transformation efforts require senior executives to set the direction, lead communication efforts, model desired behaviors, align resources, and hold the rest of the organization accountable. However, CX leaders and their teams often struggle to obtain the commitment and involvement necessary from senior executives to ensure these change efforts succeed. In this report, we provide a model for how CX teams can effectively engage their senior leaders. Here are some highlights:

The blueprint includes six levers CX leaders can use to gain and strengthen senior executive commitment: Create Vision Clarity, Share Compelling Opportunities, Amplify Emotional Empathy, Feed Intrinsic Motivations, Enable First Steps, and Fuel Ongoing Confidence.
To illustrate how these levers work, we share examples of 24 best practices from companies including Anthem, CA Technologies, Cisco, Fidelity, Microsoft, Penske Truck Leasing, and Regions Bank.
We provide CX leaders with an assessment they can use to identify the commitment stage of their senior executives and offer advice on which of the six levers can have the greatest impact by stage.

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Here are the six levers for activating executive commitment:

Create Vision Clarity. Many senior executives are enamored with the idea of customer experience, yet lack a clear picture of what CX really means for their organization. As a result, they aren’t able to persuasively advocate for the required changes. Therefore, CX teams should provide leaders with a clear understanding of where the CX efforts are heading.
Share Compelling Opportunities. Senior leaders will only stay committed to a CX effort for as long as they remain convinced that it will help the organization succeed. That’s why CX leaders must continue to make and reinforce the CX business case to senior executives. This requires establishing a tangible business case and setting realistic expectations for the upside of action and the downside of inaction.
Amplify Emotional Empathy. An executive who is emotionally committed to CX efforts provides a different level of support than one who is only intellectually bought-in. To gain this emotional commitment, the CX team should enhance executives’ natural empathy by bringing customers’ experiences to life for them.
Feed Intrinsic Motivations. Executives are motivated by a myriad of different objectives, such as being seen as successful or reaching some self-defined goals. Intrinsic motivators – like meaning, choice, competence, and progress – can be particularly powerful levers for activating commitment. CX leaders should connect their efforts to the personal goals of executives and should make them feel good about the efforts underway.
Enable First Steps. Even executives who are fully committed to the CX agenda may not know exactly what they can do to help propel the CX efforts forward, especially since they are often juggling many different priorities. It’s up to the CX leader to make it easy for the senior leaders to participate in the efforts by recommending specific, doable steps that they can take.
Fuel Ongoing Confidence. CX teams need ongoing support from their executives; however, senior leaders are prone to distraction and doubt. To keep them on track, CX leaders need to keep executives informed of the progress and success of CX efforts and need to demonstrate to executives that resources are being used well and risks are being managed well.

Here are the best practices discussed in the report:

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Report: Employee Engagement Competency & Maturity, 2017

June 5, 2017June 5, 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.

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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:

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Report: The Four Customer Experience Core Competencies (Free)

April 25, 2017July 6, 2017

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:

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

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This whiteboard video describes the Four CX Core Competencies:

Here’s an infograhic with the best practices described in the report:

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Report: 2017 Temkin Experience Ratings, UK

April 3, 2017July 25, 2017

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

March 29, 2017May 23, 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.

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

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

Report: Engaging A Tethered Workforce

January 31, 2017May 23, 2017

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.

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Here are the 17 best practices described in the report:

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Report: Translating Brand Promises into Employee Behaviors

October 4, 2016January 11, 2017

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.

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

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Report: State of Employee Engagement Maturity, 2016

July 6, 2016May 24, 2017

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.

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Here’s one of the 17 graphics:

Here’s a link to the 2015 study.

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

Report: The Federated Customer Experience Model

March 23, 2016May 24, 2017

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.

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Here are the elements of a Federated CX Model:

1603_FederatedCXModel

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Report: Employee Engagement Benchmark Study, 2016

February 16, 2016May 24, 2017

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: Read More …

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

February 10, 2016May 24, 2017

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.

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

Here are some other findings in the research: Read More …

Report: B2B Customer Experience Best Practices

November 24, 2015May 25, 2017

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.

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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:

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Report: Creating and Sustaining a Customer-Centric Culture

September 10, 2015May 25, 2017

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.

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

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

Report: Employee Engagement Competency & Maturity, 2015

July 28, 2015May 25, 2017

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.

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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.

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