Here is an example of a small change that had far-reaching implications for one company.

The Customer Experience Management group on LinkedIn has a rather lively discussion right now triggered around the question: What is the relationship between ‘having a good experience’ and ‘delighted customers’? And, can you create an ROI around ‘good experiences’. For my two-cents, I felt it worthwhile remembering that the customer’s perception of the value a company provides is more than the interaction with an agent … it is the entire relationship, which is driven by your differentiation / innovation strategy.

Adapting, innovating, and growing your business through aggressive innovation is a clear requirement for any successful executive these days. While not the only source for great ideas, Customer Intelligence is clearly an excellent tool in your innovation arsenal, both as a source for ideas and as part of implementing any new idea. In this final posting, we provide both general strategies and 5 specific steps you can use to create an innovative organization.

Adapting, innovating, and growing your business through aggressive innovation is a clear requirement for any successful executive these days. While not the only source for great ideas, Customer Intelligence is clearly an excellent tool in your innovation arsenal, both as a source for ideas and as part of implementing any new idea. In this second of a series of five postings, we talk about the need for rapid innovation and the pivotal role Customer Intelligence plays in helping you to go fast and to go right.

A B2B software and services company with more than 450 CSRs was looking to standardize the service experience, making it more consistent across all agents. When reviewing C-SAT results by supervisor, the Director of Customer Service was not surprised to note that the supervisors she considered to be rising stars in her department tended to have teams with higher-than-average C-SAT scores.

What caught her attention, however, was that the same supervisors also had received higher levels of employee satisfaction and loyalty in a recent HR-sponsored employee survey.

Employee engagement is often the primary determinant of customer satisfaction with the service experience. Innovative, valuable products and services are vital but without a friendly, helpful, knowledgeable personal encounter, those products and services quickly become commodities. In addition, it is those motivated and engaged employees who design and create and deliver those valuable products and services. The higher the emotional attachment your employees have to the company and its customers, the higher their dedication, creativity, and performance.

Looking at the call center specifically, our research has confirmed what most HR professionals have been telling us for a long time: If you give your employees incentives and opportunities they are more likely to perform well.

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