Customer experience is, as we know, a fundamental element to your business’s success. Working on a comprehensive experience throughout the entire customer journey is a futile exercise if your employees are not on board. Your staff should be your number one brand advocates, and if they’re not, then it’s worth investigating how you can turn this around to your advantage.
According to research from PostBeyond, in partnership with Golfdale Consulting: “Interest in employee advocacy has grown 191% since 2013, with 45% of respondents naming it a top external objective”. This is because businesses are starting to recognise the need to have a human opinion as a reference point for the level of trust that can be placed in them, their services or products.
The same research also divulged that “70% of adults online reported trusting recommendations from friends and family, but only 15% trusted social media posts from companies”. People trust people more than they trust brands, which is understandable. This is why your people should be the voice of your brand wherever possible.
Why Employees Should Be Campaigning Your Best Assets
Employees, especially those who have worked for the business for an extensive amount of time, know the business better than anyone else. They understand the benefits of using the company’s services, they also know which solutions work best for certain situations and can recommend the most appropriate action in order to solve customer’s problems.
Some employees are already fully engaged in speaking on behalf of the business they work for in what is called employee activism. They use any opportunity to speak highly of the business and will defend it if at all required. Employees that are engaged in the business will speak authentically about its relevance in the marketplace, without being coerced or influenced. These authoritative opinions count so much more than any communication that comes directly from the business because of the trust factor involved in a personal interaction.
Best Ways To Illicit Natural Employee Activism For Your Business
The only way that employee activism and advocacy will come across as authentic and relatable, is if it is exactly that. Authentic to the point that one can relate to it. If a business is pushing employees to speak about the business as a KPI or side-line role that needs to be carried out, the coercion will be interpreted. This kind of activity needs to be inspired from within the business so that employees carry it out of their own accord because they actually want to help the business thrive.
Employees who can see how their roles slot into the grander scheme of things will be more motivated to carry out this aspect of their jobs. Identifying where and how their roles in the business contribute to streamlined, positive customer experience, gives them the opportunity to go about executing on this themselves.
Give your employees the authority they need to be a voice of the business. Making them feel as though they are part of a broad solution that they believe in, will naturally also make them want to do the business proud. For themselves as much as it is for the business as a whole. If you establish a company culture that gives employees this freedom, you are already on the road to creating organic growth in brand advocacy that will eventually speak for itself.
Unsure of how to implement this and other effective customer experience initiatives? Speak to us. We are here to help.