[Transcript]
Narrator (00:04):
Welcome everyone. Thank you for joining us for the webcast sponsored by ITA Group, the engagement loop, turning employee experience into customer loyalty. This webcast has been pre-approved for HRCI and SHRM credits. Please be sure to attend the complete webcast in order to receive your credit. You will also receive an email from HR.com within two business days, which will include the certification credit information. You may also log into your HR.com account to view your credits. If you have any questions during the webcast, please click on Q&A in your Zoom controls and type them in. And now it is my pleasure to turn it over to our presenter, Tanya.
Tanya Fish (00:52):
Thank you. And hello to everybody. I'm excited to spend the next 45 minutes with you talking about the engagement loop. We're going to start today thinking about a moment we've all experienced. You walk into a store or call a service center and one employee changes the entire experience. We've probably all got some stories that come to mind of both positive experiences and others that are not so positive. When I think about this, I think about our local hardware store. Everyone in our neighborhood seems to frequent there for whatever they need that day. For me lately, it was a new Yeti lid because my dog ate it or paint or grass seed or fertilizer. Why do we go to that local hardware store? Because they make us feel welcome as customers. They help us navigate the store. They help us find products that solve our problems.
(01:51):
They're very knowledgeable. Ultimately, they help us feel seen and guide us. That leaves me thinking that person, that person that just served me, they get me. That was easy. I found what I needed. They made my day. Those moments aren't random. It's an engagement loop and it's the reason that the loop begins with employees. Employees make a big difference in how your customers experience your business each and every day. And today's most successful organizations understand that powerful truth. Employee experience and customer experience are inseparable and deeply interconnected. Engaged employees who deliver exceptional customer service and positive customer interactions in turn feel in themselves pride, purpose, and commitment to their organization. Today, I'm going to share with you some research findings that we've got that validate this link between employee engagement and customer satisfaction, some real world examples of companies that are putting this in action, as well as some specific areas where you can go back to your organization and focus some efforts to create this engagement loop in each day in your organization.
(03:11):
All right, we are going to pause for just a second and think about something that's happening in our world today. If you like me, are like me and you shop sometimes online, you are being often influenced and there's this new influencer culture out there. People go and they find these people that wear different clothes, that talk about different topics and they establish a trust with them and then start to go and buy what they're talking about. Something that I want you to think about, you have people employed by you today that know your product, that wear your brand on their shirts, on their name badges, and talk to your customers each and every day on the phone, in a store, in a frontline situation. Those people are the most credible, lowest cost influencers that you have and they're already on your payroll. The only question that we have is how do we get them engaged enough to use their influence for you in each day?
(04:18):
When employees are clear, confident, and able to assist customers, your company's going to have customers that keep coming back for more. So let's dive in and let's talk about our engagement loop and moments that drive people to influence others or catch others' attention. It's not the polish that people present with. It's not the script that they have in their back pocket. What holds attention is belief and trust, someone who genuinely knows a product and listens to somebody in front of them to give a point of view and clearly enjoys what they do when they're talking with their customer. Followers or customers can tell in seconds whether there's real enthusiasm that authentically is there and present in that moment or if it's just scripted. Now let's take that truth to your frontline. The same three things that drive an influencer or influence people is true for an engaged employee.
(05:20):
If they have knowledge, if they have confidence, and if they believe in what they're representing, they are the first part of your engagement loop. When they do understand those things, they're not wasting energy guessing, second guessing their decisions or protecting themselves. They're creating the right context. They're listening for the right cues in their various situations. They're coaching those in front of them and they're creating clarity in what to do next. That confidence shapes how people show up every day, how they make decisions, how they treat one another, and how they respond in those moments that you just can't script. Over time, these behaviors become your culture. They become the repeatable things that are a lived experience within your walls, between your employees and between your employees and your customers. Culture shows up most visibly where it matters most in that service to customers. So we've all had moments in our career where we want to help someone, but we don't know if we have the "authority" to do it, or maybe we don't feel like it's our job.
(06:31):
It's everyone's job to take care of our customers. Without customers, every business is going to fail. So we're going to create clarity, talk about creating confidence, creating culture and bringing the customer into the loop called the engagement loop. And an influencer, if we refer back to that concept, it's in the very same loop. At the end of the day, we just want to find out what will get those customers, whoever your customers are, coming back for more. So let's shift to a quick poll. When you think about your respective customer, when customer experience dips, what is the first instinct of your organization? Is it to update a process? Is it to add or update tools made available to them or is it to engage people? Pick one item that seems to be your first instinct as an organization.
(07:35):
And let's see what those results are showing. I'm pleased to see that 56% of you say that engaging people is part of that first reaction. Updating process is a close second followed by adding or updating tools. This is important because you can see in this engagement loop that we're talking about, if we think about employees first, each step thereafter in the loop is going to follow. One more question for you. What is your biggest employee experience friction point? Is it recognition? Is it communication to them? Is it managers or is it the workload of employees?
(08:32):
Have you pick your top choice here? What's the biggest friction point? And let's see what those results are showing here. So the biggest friction point according to folks on the call today are first communication, which doesn't surprise me. Communication is the key to knowing what to say, knowing what to do, and knowing what's coming to share something with another person. And you all have heard this, so it's not shocking. We have to say things multiple times. Seven times I think is the magic number that's out there to get people to hear you. Second, again, employee workload is something that we're all facing. Our world is changing fast and we all are doing our best with what is in front of us. So employee workload is our second opportunity for a friction point followed by managerability and recognition. So let's continue and dig a little bit deeper into this.
(09:46):
We know why the engagement loop matters. Now let's define that engagement loop. We've just said that knowledge, confidence, and genuine belief really creates influence from your people to a customer. So the obvious question is how do you build that with purpose and people who never signed up to be influencers at your organization, let's be honest. The four parts of this loop though are real. Culture and support at the top is the first one we'll talk about. And the way I think about this is I won't be punished for doing the right thing. I ask you to question in your culture, is that a true statement that you hear out of people's mouths? The reality is it's what happens in the hard moments. Does someone feel backed up when they use judgment? Is a mistake treated as learning or as a liability? When support is real, emotional energy goes into the customer instead of into self-protection.
(10:44):
And that matters because customers rarely need perfect execution. They need a human response in imperfect moments. The second step of the loop, pride and purpose, follows feeling that support. The question I like to ask myself here is, do people feel that what they do is worth doing well? Do they feel like this work that they're doing is going to help someone? Those questions that you ask yourself is pride forming in people when they see their impact or get recognized for showing up, not just hitting a number. It moves from effort in minimal required personal interactions to customers that feel instantly through tone, through patience and through follow through, someone who cares. Purpose answers a quieter question. Why does this matter beyond my paycheck? When people know who they help and why their role matters, they'll make better calls in the moments that you may never see.
(11:46):
It's empathy over efficiency, ownership over deflection.
(11:53):
The next step at the bottom of the screen, customer service. This is where this engagement loop all shows up. Putting these things together, this is what the customer experiences, faster resolution because people act instead of escalating, more human interactions because fear has been removed and consistency in moments that aren't scripted. And then the last part of the loop is feedback and success. And this is where you get that reinforcement and a feeling for your employees of my voice. It really matters. And honestly, your customers, my voice as a customer really matters. When you invite feedback and continually act on it, people feel heard rather than managed. Behaviorally, that's the difference between an employee who speaks up and one who quietly opts out. It's the difference between fixing an issue and working around it. It's the difference between taking responsibility and waiting for permission. Feedback builds ownership and ownership is a prerequisite for good service.
(13:01):
So at the end of the day, employee experience doesn't compete with customer experience. It actually creates it. Feedback and support build the confidence to speak up, pride and purpose build the belief that makes someone worth listening to, and that's the loop feeding itself. What you put in on the inside is exactly what your customers will feel on the outside. So if that's the theory, let's talk about how real companies are putting this into motion. Here's some companies who are betting their payroll on this right now. First, we'll talk about Target.
(13:41):
I'm sure many of you have been in a Target, but imagine yourself in the store, in an aisle that's a mess, a shelf that's empty, and along a line that's long, and the one employee you find is clearly covering three sections at once. That's not a bad employee, that's a person that might be set up to fail. And that's something that Target heard through surveying their customers. That was their reality a year ago. Their CEO diagnosed this as a frontline capacity problem and they added store labor hours, shifted people from corporate and distribution roles to the front line and removed management layers to reduce some friction. Target quickly is becoming a real world example of this principle that we've been developing about clear expectations, setting a guest experience standard in employees, training and communication. Over 300,000 Target associates were trained in serving their customers and support and resources.
(14:48):
There was more labor hours and more payroll put towards the front line. The message is we're investing where it matters most in our teams and in our stores. And the results are undeniable. There's employee confidence and improved engagement. There's better customer interactions happening and Target's reporting higher customer satisfaction and NPS net promoter score for three consecutive quarters. In fact, it's a three or high in both of those metrics for Target, and they know that the business performance is following this. Second story I have is Starbucks. This is the loop automated maybe in a different way. The reality here is they were getting feedback that mobile orders were piling up on a counter, their team members were not making eye contact with customers, and the name on the cup didn't mean anything anymore. It was efficient, but it was an empty experience being delivered. So what did they do?
(15:51):
Their CEO says plainly, technology went too far. They added staffing, they slowed some automation or reversed some of it, and they've created focus back on that handwritten cup. The condiment bars came back, real training went into effect, and role clarity was created for store managers. The results, connection scores were up, complaints were down quarter over quarter, and before long, the financials were fully recovering. The loop opportunity here with our engagement loop is that you can't automate your way to creating a belief. You can't just do this through efficiency. Employee pride in the interaction with the customers is actually what's driving them in coming back and buying that product over and over. One year later, after Starbucks did this, their customers were reporting friendlier stores, better interactions, better service speed and experiences and more consistency across locations, something I bet some of you have felt. And by mid 2026, Starbucks has reported four consecutive quarters of positive global comparable store sales, a second consecutive quarter of expanding profit margins and their North America comparable store sales growth is above 8%, the best in three years, and they're attributing this to their focus on the customer and the front line.
(17:25):
One more complete story, Home Depot, one brand that you're all familiar with in at least the North America area. In this situation, there is an inverted pyramid in place that is by design created by Home Depot. They know that associates and customers are of critical importance to the success of their business. They're at the top of this inverted pyramid. Leadership is in the middle and they exist to support associates and customers. And this is championed all the way to the bottom peak of the pyramid, which is their senior leadership. Their formula, invest in people, build expertise and confidence, enable judgment, deliver human problem solving, and earn repeat business. The big theme is culture is a business strategy for Home Depot. Their CEO is quoted as saying, "Our focus is to drive our core and culture, deliver a frictionless interconnected experience and to win our customers and pros." It's a remarkable statement because culture isn't listed as just an HR initiative.
(18:39):
It's listed alongside customer experience, innovation, and market share and growth.
(18:47):
When their senior VP of sales is quoted about this, she says that employees being engaged, knowledgeable, and equipped to serve the customer is where they have laser focus with their team. And this is different than many other retailers whose strategies center primarily on pricing, promotions or automation, and it establishes that engagement loop that is repeatable. Again, and the outcomes, they're undeniable. In August of 2026, just this month, measurable outcomes from Home Depot are being reported in greater associate engagement, improved customer satisfaction, and strong store performance with same store sales rising 1.7% year over year in the second quarter of 2026. There are many stories that I could share. One more I'm going to share before we move on is Winsupply. I'm sharing this one because it's at scale. With WinSupply, they have a store standards program across 600 stores that gives every location clear expectations and the right tools.
(19:57):
But at the same time, they create local ownership of execution of this with their leadership, and it's working for WinSupply with more consistent customer experiences and a documented 53% increase in sales. The message from WinSupply is that consistency does not come from control. It comes from that clarity across every location on what good and what standards are and what they look like.
(20:28):
So my question for you, where does HR intervene to strengthen this engagement loop? At ITA Group, through our market research, we study behavior change the same way we study employee customer loyalty. We study this as a habit loop. We think about what are the cues that you can use to create focus in any particular audience, where can routines or habits be established, and where can rewards be placed to create attention, to celebrate milestones and to create a surprise and delight moment to reinforce important behaviors or habits when they're observed? ITA Group has used this exact habit loop formation to segment our employees and our loyalty program members to see what triggers them, what behaviors we need to repeat, and what rewards, including psychological rewards, which I'll get to in a second, actually sustain loyalty behavior. So when we talk about an engagement loop, we're not speaking metaphorically, we're describing a behavioral system and research shows that the psychological rewards inside the system are what makes it stick.
(21:43):
Here's what the research tells us. When you measure engagement at a deeper psychological level, you're not looking for just what's satisfied from an employer perspective, like are you satisfied with your organization as an employee and would you recommend to others? The reality is you can explain a huge amount of why people show up engaged through psychological benefits with nearly 70% of the variance in employee engagement, which is huge in human behavior research as a variance. And what you'll find in plain terms is that engagement isn't primarily driven by perks or programs, it's actually driven by whether work delivers the psychological experience that people are wired to seek and that psychological benefit that employees are craving most identified here in the second box on screen is personal identity. We also find that personal identity, which is defined as what I do matters or I matter here is the top predictor of employee engagement.
(22:53):
What's important is this isn't abstract. The research connects these psychological benefits to initiatives that organizations are already running and that many of you in HR have some responsibility over, recognition, communication and leader practices because those are the mechanisms that drive identity, emotional safety and clarity at scale for your employees. And here's where the loop closes in the final box on this screen. When employees experience these psychological rewards, they show up differently. The interaction quality changes, customer satisfaction improves and performance follows. It's exactly what we've seen and heard about in those client examples just a little bit ago. And we see the same compounding effects on the customer side. Our customer loyalty research has proven that customers who feel emotionally connected are four times more likely to visit and four times more likely to spend than their disconnected peers. Emotional connection is more than just a normal transaction.
(24:04):
It's a sense of belonging, trust, and personal relevance that customers feel when they interact. It's that they're not just another number. Emotionally connected customers are active, they're loyal and they're likely to participate in things that you offer as a brand. They create value and find ease with emotional connection that for you gets more sales and creates advocates or influencers who drive continued business success. What I'm going to leave you with here is emotional connection is the real benefit that we're looking for. It's the reward that keeps this habit loop going. We need to have a cue, a routine and rewards in place to reinforce this identity loop.
(24:58):
All right, so I think those case studies I shared a little earlier are probably a pretty good business case for this loop, but I have a little bit more for you. This loop makes explicit something that many leaders know intuitively but struggle to operationalize. Employee experience directly shapes customer experience. Customers don't experience your values, your brand promise, or your strategy in the abstract. They experience it through human interaction. If your employees are clear, they feel supported and valued, that shows up with your customers as confidence, as care, and as follow through and customer moments. If they don't, customers feel this immediately. Employee experience is not adjacent to your customer experience. It is the delivery mechanism. So my question for you at your organization is how can you extend your values and your brand promise to your customers through your employees?
(26:05):
The second piece of this is visibility. This is where many organizations break this loop. Employees often do the right things, but they don't see the impact of their work. When we connect our employees to real customer stories, to the feedback you're hearing, to the outcomes that employees or customers are having or your business is having, and moments of appreciation, something really powerful happens. Work starts to feel more emotional and less transactional. Work feels more meaningful, and that meaning is what reinforces pride and identity in your people. And that is that strongest psychological driver of engagement I was talking about earlier. People repeat behaviors when they see that their actions mattered.
(26:58):
Third, the third box on this screen, this is where the engagement loop stops being a feel good concept and becomes a strategic lever. When engagement is intentionally designed through recognition, communication and leadership behaviors, it reinforces those behaviors that improve service quality, consistency, and customer trust. This is where you can study your top performers and see what are the behaviors that they're engaging in, how are we recognizing them and how is that fueling their success and how can we create some of those repeat cues and behaviors and rewards for others to spread that engagement across your organization? It's ultimately about using engagement deliberately to activate behaviors that customers actually experience. Engagement isn't the goal, customer outcomes are the goal here. Engagement is the mechanism to get there. When the engagement loop closes, engagement earns its place as a growth strategy. Emotionally connected customers spend more, they stay longer and they advocate more.
(28:09):
And that emotional connection, it doesn't start with marketing. It starts with the employees who believe in what they're delivering and feel valued when they do it. When an organization invests in an engagement loop, they stop treating engagement as a cost center and they start managing it as a compounding asset. The loop is how culture in your organization turns into revenue. And even though all of us on this call likely work in HR today, we have a direct opportunity to connect what we are doing in our roles to revenue and the business success of our organization. So let's dig in and talk about the specific ways that I think HR can influence this engagement loop. Think back to that customer experience that we talked about earlier when you were thinking about what was memorable to you. Mine was the hardware store as a reminder. What made that destination or that influencer, that employee worth coming back to or following was the knowledge, the confidence, and the real belief they had.
(29:22):
These levers that you see on screen are how you manufacture those things on purpose in your own workforce. Communication gives employees the knowledge to speak with authority. Leadership development makes that consistent enough to scale it. Appreciation helps earn the belief and recognition tells your people which behaviors are worth repeating. Retailers pay outside creators for this, but you can build it right inside your own walls.
(29:55):
So communication creates clarity and confidence to repeat this. Leadership creates consistency at scale. Appreciation ultimately comes down to emotional safety and trust, and recognition is that behavioral enforcement. I'm going to dive into each one just a little bit here. So when we think about communication, communication is providing context and meaning to your people. Effective communication doesn't just transmit information. It can, but it definitely helps when it's understood and people know how to act on that communication. When communication is strong, employees don't fill gaps with fear or assumptions. Expectations are aligned as conditions change and people act decisively instead of waiting. This was our top opportunity identified earlier and something that we can really focus on across, it sounds like, all of our organizations, communication, connecting expectations to behavior that we see in our workforce. Without communication, employees stall, hesitate, misinterpret what good looks like, or maybe misfire altogether.
(31:14):
The second opportunity is leadership development. A company or a brand can't buy its way out of an inconsistent frontline. You heard earlier how Target and Starbucks and Home Depot invest directly in their frontline as a result of what they believe. One associate who's clear and confident is a great moment, but 200 of them or 200,000 of them, that's a channel. Leadership development is what turns an individual who's credible into scale. Leadership development as a part of the loop is what's creating that consistency and durability of the engagement loop. It equips leaders to apply appreciation authentically with team members. Can't be mechanical. It needs to be authentic. It equips leaders to recognize as a reinforcement, not just reward, to communicate with clarity and care and uncertainty. This might require some situational learning, but communicating with clarity and care and uncertainty is key. Coaching people in key moments, not just managing the tasks at hand.
(32:29):
And finally, strong leaders turn systems into experiences, both for your employees and for your customers. Leadership development protects the loop from breaking at the management layer, which is a common failure point. If missing, fragile, uneven experiences occur. And we heard that through the Starbucks story. They really chose intentionally to stop and at scale train across their entire network for consistent experiences.
(33:00):
The third way that I think we as HR leaders working with people can help is appreciation. Appreciation, as I mentioned earlier, creates that emotional safety and suggests to your team members, I see you. And that's a prerequisite for engagement. It's that psychological benefit that's leading in the engagement cycle. When we think about back to the influencer idea, creators or influencers, they show up as themselves. That's why people follow them. Appreciation is what makes it safe for an employee to do the same instead of hiding behind a checkout counter or in an aisle. We've all seen stories and probably seen videos of Southwest Airlines flight attendants going viral. They're putting at play the number one identity benefit that our research named. They're being themselves and they're finding pride and joy in representing their company to their customers, those of us that are flying. Appreciation fuels the starting condition and creates the willingness for people to engage at all.
(34:13):
Last for this part, but definitely not least is recognition. Recognition, as I noted earlier, is reinforcing what good looks like in what you deliver. Recognition creates directional clarity. It answers when is my work making a difference and what's resulting from it? What does success look like here really? When recognition is timely, meaning quick after you see a behavior and specific, who's it for, what did you see and what did that result in, you see desired behaviors repeated. You see expectations become tangible, not theoretical, and you see values move from words to lived experiences. So in the engagement loop, recognition reinforces behavior to create impact and repetition. Without recognition, effort can become guesswork. Confusion can occur, and often there's a misaligned effort or sometimes eroded motivation.
(35:20):
All right, so time for you to think about your organization. When you think about employee engagement, you may have an employee engagement survey, you might just have a sense of what employee engagement is. Are you in a high or a low category or maybe somewhere in between? For now, try to get to a high or low category for sake of example. Likewise, if you think about what you're hearing about your customer volatility, is volatility with customers high or is it low? Low meaning that you have customers coming back and repeat purchasing and sales are great.
(36:02):
Does everybody kind of have a sense for their organization? So this is just a quick opportunity for you to say, based on where you've landed on this grid, where might you create some focus first? If you have high employee engagement but still have high volatility in customers, perhaps you can continue to reinforce recognition basics, meaning getting specific on what are you seeing in behavior of your employees that's delivering what results and celebrating that with people so they know when they're doing good work or displaying positive behaviors. On the other end of the spectrum, let's look at the box where employee engagement is low and customer volatility is low. In this situation, you may want to build a recognition program focusing on core values, connecting to the voice of customer, so you can really get a sense of where are those refined opportunities to improve your customer experience through improving your employee engagement and experience.
(37:18):
Okay. I'm going to leave you with three real things that I think we each can relate to today. There's some ways that we can enhance the employee experience by connecting it to our customer experience. Really where this starts is by sharing, translating and celebrating voice of customer. If that's a goal, you can get data effectively to have a content strategy with your employees to point some communications inward with your employee population and that content is going to work when it's specific, when it's human, and when it's timely. It's got to be more than great job. It's got to be very specific. Who are you recognizing or celebrating? When did they demonstrate something? What was the impact that it had and why does that matter to your business? Every customer story that you circulate internally is going to train your people in what a good story sounds like and looks like in action.
(38:25):
And that's exactly what they're going to carry out when they're on the front line with your customers. And they're probably also going to take it out into their own lived experience. And as we've talked about, many of our people might be influencing others not only at work, but in their day-to-day. So my challenge to you, weekly, what if you found one customer story? So found a peer in a different department that was in charge of customer interactions or in sales, find a story and find the behavior in an employee that you can spotlight that drove the positive story that you found. Monthly, share promises kept highlights. What are the behaviors that we have seen through customer stories and what promises have we kept to our customers as a result of those behaviors? And quarterly, tie recognition moments to customer outcomes directly and share those in your organization.
(39:34):
You can ground this if you have a recognition platform in grabbing the data and then pairing it up with customer data, customer experience data, voice of customer data to have really powerful stories to share back with your employees to create this habit loop, this engagement loop.
(39:55):
My second challenge to you is in sharing those stories of impact, and this is based on storytelling. So go beyond that good job, like I said earlier. It's important to really create a story here and I'm going to share a story as a result of that. So at IT Group, a couple things that we do is employee net promoter score surveys from clients. We ask clients to participate in these and then they're shared with leadership regularly as they come in and then they're shared with the respective team and recognition is constantly happening from leadership down to the direct employees that influence our customers positively based on the voice our customer is sharing. A second example, in our leader meetings, we have an open forum for customer impact stories at each meeting. These can be positive, they can be negative, but what it creates is that conversation on where are behaviors of our employees showing up strong and where are there opportunities based on what we're hearing from our customers?
(41:08):
And third, we train our team members on behaviors that we believe through our culture are going to drive a positive customer experience through our recognition program. And we focus heavily on what quality meaningful recognition looks like, applying storytelling to every recognition that's happening to humanize the data and to make it meaningful, impactful and specific so people know what behaviors to repeat each and every day.
(41:40):
This is a way to really emphasize your culture inside your walls and outside your walls. The last example I have is the infamous AI. We have to talk about AI, right? It's everywhere for all of us and I know you're hearing about it, but I'm going to spin this a little bit differently. Somewhere in your organization right now, there's a part-time employee who runs a 40,000 follower account on the side. There's someone in your warehouse who's fluent in a second language that half your customers speak. There's someone in a call center who taught themselves to build a tracker that their whole team now depends on. AI is an enabler for all of our team members. But if nobody knows this, it's not necessarily that people are hiding it, it's because no one's asked them. There's no system to surface this. So that's the real cost of not listening at scale.
(42:40):
The great opportunity is that through patterns in data, for example, your recognition copy, your feedback surveys from your employees and your customers, there is sentiment being identified. There are signals that you collect that you can't read fast enough, but AI can help. It can find the themes, the hotspots, the strengths, and it can find the problems early enough to create coaching conversations instead of taking that into an exit interview or to a lost customer. It finds those strengths that you might not know you have within your own walls and that creates enhanced leadership insight. An early warning view of engagement peeps or dips and what's driving them really creates the opportunity to strengthen how your organization shows up every day. The key with AI from this lens is use it to assist, not to replace things. And this is a line that matters. AI can tell you where to look, can tell you who to ask, but it can't tell someone they matter.
(43:49):
The pattern is the cue. Remember I've talked about cues. The human experience is the routine or the things we want to create habits out of. Those behaviors, the response of humans to the cues, and pride is the reward that we're looking for, helping people feel proud of what they're doing and what they can offer to your organization. So use AI for what it's generally good at, making sure no one on your team goes unseen and that the person who's struggling isn't quietly extraordinary and able to do things for your organization that are just going untapped. When AI assists, it provides insights, it enables insights to have conversations that matter. We're using AI in a lot of our solutions for just that, giving those insights that matter to create those human connections at the right places and at the right times.
(44:49):
So let's leave you with something that you can take action with and build an engagement loop for you. So I challenge you, what's something you can do in the next 30 days? I'm going to ask you to pick one customer outcome that you think you can improve. Think about it. It's a customer outcome in your respective business that you want to improve. Now choose a behavior, an employee behavior. This might be behaviors that you've seen noted in your recognition data. This might be behaviors you've seen in surveys, but what behaviors of employees drive that customer outcome that you want to improve?
(45:40):
Now think about how can you align recognition and communication to reinforce these behaviors? Is there someone on your internal marketing team that you can engage? Are there specific behaviors that aren't part of your recognition program that you might want to add to it to reinforce specific behaviors? How can we align recognition and communication? And finally, let's close this loop and let's think about how can you get data from listening, from your voice of customer survey, from your customer interviews to gather feedback on those behaviors and outcomes that you're looking to see. My ask of you and my challenge of you is to establish something that you can act on, review it weekly and make adjustments monthly. And what I guarantee from that is that you will see proud employees that are influencing your customers and are having an incredible impact on your bottom line and your business.
(46:55):
So with that, I'm going to wrap up for today and head off to answer any questions that have been coming up. Sophia and Tim, are there any questions that we want to bring to life that people have had in chat?
Tim Schieffer (47:15):
Yes, we've had a few questions, Tanya, and a couple of them that we'll take before the time ends. One would be the starting point of what touchpoints in the employee journey would have the most direct measurable impact on the customer experience in your opinion?
Tanya Fish (47:33):
Yeah, honestly, I think it's clarity. I think if we really think about human nature, everyone has positive intent at the end of the day. That said, not everybody has clarity on how they should act and what they should do to deliver the strongest impact to our business. So that clarity of what behaviors look good in your workplace and drive good experiences is what I would really focus on, getting clarity on and then communicating clearly through examples to your employees.
Tim Schieffer (48:12):
Perfect. Yeah,
Tanya Fish (48:14):
Tim, what's next?
Tim Schieffer (48:16):
The other one that we hear quite often is giving some thoughts on how to prove the loyalty effect to an executive leadership level in order to help people secure their different initiatives and funding for those initiatives.
Tanya Fish (48:34):
Yeah, I think where this is a huge opportunity is for us to partner with peers in our customer experience, our client experience departments, and in our sales departments. Because what I can guarantee you'll find is where you in HR maybe have recognition data or employee engagement data, you're going to find areas where you have high results, regions or stores or locations that peak in recognition and engagement. When we've studied that and paired it with the data in sales by those same locations or same regions or by customer experience surveys for those same regions and same locations, there's almost always a direct correlation. And the reality is those are the business metrics that define the success of every organization. So if we can connect what we're doing for our people and investing in through our people to those results, I think you're going to get a different level of attention in the C-suite.
Tim Schieffer (49:45):
Fantastic advice. Last one that we'll answer and then we'll toss it back to Bia, but you had mentioned surveys and a number of feedback mechanisms. Can you just reinforce what those would be beyond just the annual survey that would really uncover what truly resonates with those frontline associates?
Tanya Fish (50:06):
Absolutely.This is really going to vary across organizations and what feedback mechanisms you have in place, but what I would tell you is all of us have social networks these days, so that may be going out to things like Reddit to see what people are saying about your organization. That's more of the informal way of crowdsourcing perspective. The more formal ways are employee engagement surveys, voice of customer surveys. So in retail at least on receipts or in healthcare on discharge papers, having a place for customers or patients to give feedback is a great opportunity and getting that data to connect it to your employee experience data, huge opportunity. But pulse surveys are the way to make it really timely. Having the opportunity to check in with your people, especially after disruption or change in your organization to see what are they experiencing, what are they feeling, what are they hearing from customers, what are they seeing in each other's behaviors that gives you insights into behaviors that one, you want repeated or maybe two, you want to actually coach away from to drive a better culture and better customer outcomes.
(51:31):
But every organization I would say is going to have some different ways that they're talking with both their internal people and their customers. The key is finding out what those are and who the owners of them are so you can have a conversation.
Tim Schieffer (51:45):
Fantastic advice and thank you so much, Tanya, for a wonderful presentation and outlining the impact of the engagement loop. It's really a difference maker in a lot of organizations and we appreciate it. With that, we're going to toss it back to Bia, and thank you again.
Narrator (52:06):
Well, and that concludes our webcast for today. I would like to thank our awesome presenter, Tanya, as well as all of you for joining us. If you were in attendance for the full webcast, your HRCI and SHRM credit will be in your HR.com account within 24 hours. We will also send you an email with your credits information. If you came late or you would like to view this webcast again, the recording and slides will be available on HR.com on our on-demand webcast page. I would like to remind the audience to please fill out a quick feedback survey that will open on a new tab on your screen. It will only take you one minute and your valuable input is key to improving the quality of our webcasts. Our next session is going to start shortly to join in. Please click over to HR.com event auditorium and join us for the next session.
(53:04):
Thank you very much and have yourselves an amazing day.
Tanya Fish (53:09):
Thanks everyone.