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Steve:
The key to a great customer experience is making certain your employees are equipped with the tools and knowledge they need to deliver it.

Georgetta:
You know, employees might not necessarily understand not only the bigger picture as to what it is that the customer needs, but then if your technology doesn't allow you to deliver that fast service, you can't expect the employee to be able to do so if what you're actually asking them to operate on from a platform perspective isn't doing it for them.

Steve:
Employee Enablement As one of the Eight Essential Themes Driving CX Evolution on this episode of The CX Leader Podcast.

Announcer:
The CX Leader Podcast with Steve Walker is produced by Walker, an experience management firm that helps our clients accelerate their XM success. You can find out more at walkerinfo.com.

Steve:
Hello, everyone. I'm Steve Walker, host of The CX Leader Podcast and thank you for listening. As we like to say on this podcast, it's never been a better time to be a CX leader. And we explore the topics and themes to help leaders like you deliver amazing experiences to your customers. Welcome to episode number four in our series "CX Now: Eight Essential Themes Driving CX Evolution," where we take a close look at today's current topics and trends that CX pros need to embrace to be better leaders and take their programs to the next level. We developed this in collaboration with our partners at Qualtrics, which includes feedback from more than 50 CX leaders. So far we've covered the digital interactive experience, personalization, and predictive analysis, and you can listen to those episodes on our website, cxleaderpodcast.com. On this episode, we'll discuss employee enablement, providing necessary training, resources and systems so employees can deliver ideal customer experiences. Well, our guest today is no stranger to the podcast, having been a guest back in May of 2020. Georgetta Parisi is a vice president here in our advisory and managed services here at Walker and Georgetta, welcome back to the CX Leader and welcome as your first time as a Walker colleague. And so glad to have you here to talk about employee enablement.

Georgetta:
Thank you. I appreciate you inviting me to participate.

Steve:
Yeah, well, when we talk to you back in, I guess, May of 2020, you were a client.

Georgetta:
I was.

Steve:
Yeah. And you gave us a great case study at that time. And just for folks that may not be familiar, just give us a little bit about your CX journey and your background and how you come to be our expert on employee enablement today.

Georgetta:
Sure. So, Steve, my background actually is pretty diverse. I have actually a human resources background as well as a customer operations background and as well as my doctorate in organizational change and organizational development and change. And so, you know, through my work experience, I've worn many hats relative to how we integrate the employee in the process of delivering excellent customer service experiences.

Steve:
Yeah, it's it's excellent to have a doctor here in the house for this topic. And congratulations. I know you you worked really hard, hard for that. And that's something I will never have. I, you know, I barely got out of Boston University with a B.A., so…

Georgetta:
Thank you. Appreciate it.

Steve:
You know, this has been a great series so far, and I've really enjoyed talking to my Walker colleagues who I think are some of the best guests we ever get to come on the podcast. But we're kind of setting up for the future of CX and employee enablement is one of those things that we've identified as one of the key trends for the CX pros to really have a finger on the pulse of. But one of the things we've… One of the ways we've done this is we've… We've allowed you as our expert to sort of define what we mean when we talk about employee enablement. So, Doctor Parisi, if you would do us the pleasure of from your perspective, what are we talking about when we talk about employee enablement as it relates to customer experience?

Georgetta:
So from an employee enablement perspective, it's really about providing the training, the resources, the systems necessary for employees to be able to deliver ideal customer experiences. You know, in the absence of understanding what customers are saying about their experiences with an organization employee is just not having visibility into it. You can't expect them to necessarily provide those great experiences if you're not equipping them with the information and support necessary for them to actually deliver. And so when we think about an employee enablement, it's really about that.

Steve:
Yeah. And, you know, I'm just kind of struck here that, you know, particularly frontline employees, they are often the they're sort of the, I want to say benefactors, but they're actually the recipients of when when the systems and the enablement isn't correct, right?

Georgetta:
Absolutely. Yeah. We often find that the very thing that customers are expecting are the very things that employees aren't able to deliver because we haven't equipped them with the tools they need in order to be able to provide those great, great experiences.

Steve:
Yeah. Part of the problem with being in this business is you get pretty particular about your experiences and sometimes you just feel so bad for those frontline folks that it's not their fault. But boy, they're they're the ones that are having to deal with it. What are just generally what are some of the main reasons or some examples of when we're not doing right with these employees and not putting them in a position to actually deliver good experiences?

Georgetta:
So I have a lot of experience in leading call centers and contact centers. And what I've seen is whereby again, customers have these expectations around how you might solve their problems or issues or concerns that they're raising and your employees might not necessarily understand not only the bigger picture as to what it is that the customer needs, but then if you don't have the technology, so for example, you might have a data technology as an example that creates delivering a service in a sort of slow way and people in general right there trying to get things done and move on to the next thing. And if your technology doesn't allow you to deliver that fast service, you can't expect the employee to be able to to do so if what you're actually asking them to operate on from a platform perspective isn't doing it for them. And so those would be some of the situation that arises. Also, just workflows and processes tend to be somewhat difficult sometimes where you have maybe a lot of sort of internal, for lack of better word bureaucracy and processes that just make it difficult for employees in an organization to get things done for their customers.

Steve:
Yeah. So you mentioned technology. You mentioned also just sort of systems or processes. I suppose training and development is is another one where we we rush them into the fight too quickly without the proper training?

Georgetta:
Absolutely. That happens all the time, especially nowadays, you know, the environment out there in terms of finding people to fill critical roles is difficult and having to get people up and running and being able to, as they say, hit the ground running, makes makes it such that organizations may push people through an onboarding process a little bit too quickly and then they're not equipped to understand how to handle customer support and customer situations.

Steve:
Yeah, and this is kind of a leading question, I guess. But, you know, every once in a while, you know, there is a bad apple every once in a while. But I would say that the vast majority, I mean, high 90% of people who are in the workforce actually really want to try to do a good job, right?

Georgetta:
Absolutely. Absolutely. Nobody wants to do a bad job that doesn't feel good. And so it's an organization's responsibility to really bring together the understanding of customer expectations and experiences and then equipping their employees to be able to enable them to deliver those and feel good about what they're doing day to day.

Steve:
Yeah, so we've talked about it. It's really kind of a resource constraint, if you will. And if an organization is behind or there's obviously there are problems with their model from a standpoint of delivering, you know, customer engagement and enabling these employees, where should they start? What should an organization do to try to ultimately fix it? But, you know, just to start making some progress in this area.

Georgetta:
Yeah, great question. So it's all about systems process people, right? People process systems, as they say. And so there's prioritization. There's there's organizations have to decide, of course, where they're going to invest their resources. And there are probably some things, again, in my experience, that customer expectations and aligning those to employee enablement… enablement are typically you'll find there are some low hanging fruits, very quick wins that you may not necessarily recognize until you get that customer feedback and employee feedback in terms of how employees will perceive that customer's feedback. They're the ones that know what and how to accomplish their responsibilities on behalf of customers. And so involving them in the process, they'll be able to identify those quick wins because they're doing it day in and day out, especially from a process standpoint. Technology, right? There's tend to be more long term investments that organizations have to decide whether or not it makes sense for them. And so you kind of map it all out. What's the short term quick wins and what's some of those longer term strategies that you can implement? That require maybe some deeper investment over time and just really map that out. And from a prioritization standpoint, what's going to have the biggest bang for the buck, so to speak, that's going to drive, improve customer experiences, enable employees to deliver it, and everyone feels good about what they're doing.

Steve:
We talked earlier about the contact center or front line employees who really they are at the tip of the spear here, and they're the ones that have to deal with all the bad process and and bad resources. But how can we use some of that feedback to go inform the rest of the organization, For example, you know, sales, you know, who's who's setting the expectations for product development, maybe some other supply chain. What what are some of the kind of the ways that we can integrate this back, not just only for the front line employees, but for everybody in the organization?

Georgetta:
Yeah, it's all about communication and having a very strong and structured communication strategy internally that feeds the organization. Regardless of where you sit in an organization with feedback from customers, customer expectations, but also the feedback from employees in terms of how they're servicing those customers and where those opportunities are. And so you can bridge the gap between the two. And in terms of making sure, for example, your sales organization, some perfect example. And one of the clients that I work with, they had an experience recently where they received some feedback from specific contacts within their accounts, and it really helped highlight for them that some of the strength of the relationships they've had with their customers wasn't as strong as maybe what they had sort of initially thought. And so it equipped them with what they needed to know in order to engage that client in a very different way. Just start strengthening that relationship. So it's all about communication.

Steve:
Yeah. And actually, while you're talking, you kind of spurred another thought in my mind, You know, if this is going to be pervasive in an organization, if you really are going to have a customer focused organization, everyone in the company really has to understand what the company is trying to accomplish from an experience standpoint. And silos and organizational structures don't always facilitate that. So you talk about communication, but it's really imperative on the leadership of the organization to make sure that everyone in the organization has kind of a big picture view of of what we're trying to accomplish. We sometimes talk about what, like, you know, the ideal experience or the ideal customer journey. What what would this look like if we could design it with the customer in mind to start with?

Georgetta:
Yeah, absolutely. And so you're right. You know, leadership has to set the stage and and the direction and, you know, support customer centricity in order for the rest of an organization to really be behind it and to again, empower and enable people to make the decisions in their day to day roles, to support customers in an effective way and create an environment in culture that supports feedback internally, externally and up and down and across an organization so that good ideas, suggestions are all embraced and understood again, because the people who know how to serve customers most effectively, maybe those frontline workers initially or sales account managers, but everyone in an organization plays a role. Your HR departments and finance departments and back office functions, everyone plays a role in that. And so to your point, Steve, leadership setting the stage, setting the direction and the expectation and then as important is creating the culture of openness and honesty to be able to share ideas and feel safe and so doing so.

Steve:
And let's talk a little bit about then how measurement would play into that, too. As you know, as you set sort of an expectation or kind of an aspirational type of experience, how can you use your actual feedback systems both for customers and for employees to inform that? You mentioned the example earlier where they, you know, the client realized that maybe their relationships weren't as deep as as what they thought?

Georgetta:
Sure. Well, you you really bring together or integrate a couple of key data elements across different functional areas. So you have your customer insights. Right? That you may be gaining through customer research and customer surveys and other other touchpoints that you have with customers. You have your operational data which helps inform your internal processes and you can evaluate whether or not those operational metrics are aligned to your customer metrics. And if your customer metrics are aligned to your operational metrics, and then you have your financial information as well and those metrics and are they all tied together and are you using information from all those data points, if you will, to drive and support an organization's strategy? So if you're looking to grow your clients, do you have all the information you need from operations, from your customer insights? Are you managing your revenues and retentions percentages? All those things come together to give you a holistic picture and view as to how you're you're achieving your strategy.

Steve:
Hey, my guest on the podcast this week is Georgetta Parisi, and she's a vice president here at Walker. We're having a great discussion of employee enablement as part of our series on "CX Now," the eight essential themes that are driving our CX evolution. I want to take advantage of your background, particularly with contact centers, because I think most of our listeners can, you know, if they don't have a contact center in their operation they've certainly interacted with one as a customer. But kind of just real simple, you know, how would you align that kind of that customer data, employee data, operational data, and then financial data, for example, in a contact center environment?

Georgetta:
Yeah. Great question. So in a challenging question, thank you for it. So let me use an example. You may be as an organization, you're getting customer insight that measures their overall experience with an organization and you're measuring what we call the top two box, right? What percentage of your customers are rating their experience with you? Either very good or excellent. At the same time, you may be doing quality evaluations with your contact center reps or customer service representatives. And so very specifically, you can take a look at whether or not there's any correlation between those two. You could even go as deep as doing some regression analysis to look at the way in which you're measuring the quality of the interactions of your customer service reps with customers doesn't match. And are you measuring the right things that really your customers are telling you are most important in terms of what's driving their experience? So that's a specific example of how I see tying all those measurements together. And then you can also, within a contact center, too, you might be doing up sales, you might be servicing a customer, but there's an opportunity to to upsell that customer when they're on the line with you. And this is where you can integrate even that financial information. Is… our… Are those experiences and those quality evaluations tying back to improve sales opportunities and revenue generation, if you will.

Steve:
Now, there might be pundits out there that would say employee experience or employee enablement is in conflict with customer engagement. What do you say to that?

Georgetta:
It doesn't have to be and it shouldn't be.

Steve:
Yeah, that's my experience too. I think it's either a win win or a lose lose, right?

Georgetta:
Absolutely. I mean, if you're you know, some people say happy customers buy more, but you have happy customers because your employees are engaged and they're working and feeling good about the environment in which they're servicing those customers.

Steve:
And yeah, and they believe in what they're doing and they feel like they're supported. And that's how it all works together.

Georgetta:
Absolutely.

Steve:
You know, one of the things I've always thought about the contact center is a great place for feedback, for improvement in the operating areas of the business. I always like to use product management, you know, or product development. You know, if if you're if you're keeping track in the call center of complaints around a certain product that has similar, you know, there's there's so much people that are just struggling with one aspect of a product, you know, the really good organizations will go and take that and go back and re-engineer the process of the system, and then they can track that later to see if you're actually reducing those the incidents of those types of calls. Can you talk a little bit maybe with with your experience around that?

Georgetta:
You're right, Steve. So there are if you're looking at, say, the types of calls that are coming in, why are customers contacting you in the first place? Typically it's because typically it's because something's wrong, right? They have an issue and you can actually start monitoring issue resolution, right. And you can feed the organization that information back in order to identify again from a workflow process, product technology perspective where the opportunity is. And then you can turn around. If you've implemented a change, you can start measuring. Did your call volume in that particular call type actually decline as a result of the action that you took? Another another way I see it too and have experienced it is not only just in the data tracking, if you will, of those types of calls. It's talking to the people who are talking to the clients. You can sit down with customer service representatives and get a ton of feedback about what's working well and what's not working well and what obstacles are there that are preventing them from providing those excellent customer experiences. That's that's one of the greatest sources of information, because they're doing it every day.

Steve:
Yeah. No, you just described, I think, the virtuous cycle that we were discussing a few moments ago. But in this case, if if the reps are given feedback, hey, hey, this thing is broken in, the company can actually go fix that. The reps feel like they've, you know, inputted into it. They see the results. Now you're lowering the amount of traffic coming into the call center. So that's going to lower the costs or would allow your reps more time not to fix stuff, but perhaps upsell or or deliver an exceptional experience. And that ultimately is going to return some sort of financial result for the company.

Georgetta:
Yeah, absolutely.

Steve:
Hey, one thing we talked just too quickly about, but technology is really key here. You know, a lot of the applications today are so complex that we really can't expect anybody to have a total understanding of everything that our organizations provide. So talk a little bit about systems and the enablement of being able to access the right information at the right moment.

Georgetta:
So again, in the contact center we often find that customer service reps have to go into multiple applications that don't talk to each other to get the information they need to provide a service to customers. If the goal is to make their job as easy as possible to service customer service their customers, in the absence of doing that, it just creates frustration for the employee. For the customer, it takes long, longer than necessary to resolve questions or issues that that come up. And I see it over and over again. And it's some of it's just the evolution of an organization and the technologies that they have in place. But a full evaluation of those things and identifying where those integrations can take place or elimination of certain technologies over time make it easy for people to deliver excellent experiences, kind of owe it to employees to be able to do that, make their make their jobs easier, and they will be far more engaged and empowered to deliver those services.

Steve:
I like that concept. We kind of owe it to them as CX pros to make sure that they're enabled.

Georgetta:
Absolutely.

Steve:
Georgetta, let's just take, for example, let's say I'm a CX pro out there and and, you know, I know we've got some issues with our employees, particularly frontline employees. And, you know, everybody's kind of aware of it. How would you get started? What would be your advice? Sort of take the first step in making sure that you're moving the needle on your employee engagement?

Georgetta:
Yeah. So Steve, I would say involve those employees in the solutions and engage them in the conversations that an organization is having around customer experience. Again, they already have the solutions. You just got to give them the opportunity to share and express and then include them in all that solution. And it can go a long, long way.

Steve:
Yeah, great advice. Georgetta, this is something we do every time you know it because you've been in the show before. But I do ask you for your take home value. You've delivered a bunch on this podcast today, but what's the one key thought that you want a listener to take away from this, that they can go and take and improve their employee enablement starting tomorrow?

Georgetta:
Yeah, no, I would say involvement, engage them in the process and let them have a voice and hear it and implement and have some success stories based on their input.

Steve:
Yeah, wise advice. You know, it's always good to engage people, listen to them, and then actually make sure that they know that you took them seriously and that they can actually see the results of that effort. Georgetta, thank you for being a guest on the podcast. I really appreciate it. If people would like to continue the conversation, just let them know how they might be able to find you, either your Walker email or LinkedIn.

Georgetta:
Yeah, so you could definitely find me on LinkedIn at Georgetta Parisi and at Walker at gparisi@walkerinfo.com.

Steve:
Dr. Georgetta Parisi is a vice president here and she's an expert in employee enablement as it relates to the customer experience. Thank you again, Georgetta, for being a guest. It's been a real pleasure. Hey, and if you want to talk about anything else you heard on this podcast or about how Walker can help your business' customer experience, feel free to email me at podcast@walkerinfo.com. Remember to give The CX Leader Podcast a rating through your podcast service and give us a review. Your feedback will help us improve the show and deliver the best possible value to you, our listener. Check out our website cxleaderpodcast.com to subscribe to the show and find all our previous episodes, podcast series and contact information so you can let us know how we're doing. The CX Leader Podcast is a production of Walker. We're an experience management firm that helps companies accelerate their XM success. You can read more about us at Walkerinfo.com. Thank you for listening. And remember, it's a great time to be a CX leader. So go out there and enable your employees a little better. We'll see you again next.

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