In order to transform your customer experience, you need to change employee behavior. But how can you encourage the right types of behavior? Two awards will help.
The Above & Beyond Award: When a customer contacts your company with a problem, you want employees to fix it as quickly as possible. Depending on the nature of the problem, that might mean doing tasks that aren’t in their official job descriptions, staying overtime, or going on what feels like an organizational scavenger hunt. The Above & Beyond Award recognizes employees who show that they’re willing to do whatever it takes to solve your customers’ issues. With this award, you’ll encourage both frontline and behind-the-scenes employees to take ownership of customer problems and see them through to resolution.
The Long View Award: The companies with the best customer experiences react swiftly to customer problems—but they don’t run around in reactive mode all day long. Instead, they make systemic changes that will keep customer problems from happening in the first place. The Long View Award recognizes employees who identify fixes that will improve the quality of your customer experience for years to come. This could include changes to processes, organization structure, technology, hiring criteria, compensation plans, or any other aspect of your company’s internal workings. With this award, you’ll help employees in every part of organization think about how their own work connects to customers—and inspire them to make proactive customer experience improvements.
To get the most out of your employee recognition program:
- Give awards on a regular basis. Find a prominent gathering, like quarterly company meetings, that will provide a regular cadence for the presentation of these two awards. The repetition will reinforce the importance of customer experience and these desirable employee behaviors.
- Honor both individuals and teams. If an employee deserves to win one of these award based on his solo work, that’s fine. But often, going above and beyond or working through a complex solution requires a team effort. Encourage employee collaboration by presenting awards to teams or ad-hoc groups in these cases.
- Weight the value of any associated prizes. You want to encourage employees to go the extra mile for customers in need, but in the long run it’s more important to orient your organization towards a proactive approach to customer experience. So if you plan to give prizes to accompany these two awards, weight their values accordingly. For example, you might give $100 for the Above & Beyond Award and $500 for the Long View Award.
