Coaching Employees for the Ultimate Customer Experience
“Stop training your employees, instead provide them the opportunity to learn” was, in my opinion, a profound statement from Dr. Natalia Preiss who heads an education team at GE Healthcare. Natalia was the third presenter in our track series on ‘Developing Customer Focus in Service Operations’ at the San Francisco NPS conference. This presentation was right on track with the theme of the conference around ‘Driving Customer Focused Behavior’.
As one might expect from a great company like GE, Natalia showed a sophisticated approach to influencing employee behavior and how NPS helped to drive improved customer focused behaviors in her company. Dr. Preiss talked about the shock that the company went through when they implemented the NPS scores and methodology. Like many organizations her teams was used to high customer satisfaction scores based on the surveys that they used but were shocked by much lower scoring by using NPS. The natural reaction is always that the NPS score must be wrong, but in my experience with many client companies, the opposite is usually true. Over time, organizations with seemingly high customer sat scores tend to get complacent and ignore the hidden truths. Getting a more direct voice of the customer, and one that clearly shows future intention rather than individual past experiences, will yield greater benefit for both you and your customers.
Once GE set out on the path of driving better customer experience they took an interesting approach. They noted that employees that had typically higher NPS scoring exhibited distinctly different behaviors. They set about working on how to change behaviors that would drive NPS improvement. They identified four key behaviors that contributed to better customer outcomes. They were:
- Humor
- Empathy
- Reduction of client effort
- Setting of correct expectations in the mind of the customers
As you can see, these are things not easily taught, especially through formal training. Through coaching and process improvement, change can occur as you allow employees the opportunity to learn.
The four behaviors broke down to two dimensions with human emotional triggers like humor and empathy on one dimension and process triggers around reduction of client effort and setting of expectations on the other dimension. Using tools for which GE is famous, process triggers could be improved systematically. The emotional triggers required a deeper understanding of human characteristics. The employees needed to understand their own characteristics and how to recognize those with in the customer with whom they were interacting. The humor for one person may not work for another and the same is true for empathy. Coaching employees to not only recognize their own traits, helped them understand and recognize the customers key traits and how the individual clients might best be served. NPS certainly provided key feedback on the success of their programs.
Natalia spoke about how understanding human behavior and traits, both physical and cultural, are needed to connect with customers appropriately. Again, it was about learning, not training. She explained also that people can use the excuse that “ I am not trained for…” but cannot deny the opportunity to learn.
As we listen to our customers, as we connect with humans in connection with driving customer experience, we have some new challenges. What was once a face to face connection now might be one that is now facilitated electronically. Teams are virtual, values are changing and a new workforce is coming. GE understands that these challenges can be helped with the input received by the NPS process to drive employee coaching. Recognizing human behavior and understanding the customer help GE Healthcare drive customer focused behavior.
