Bob Kelleher

When you’re trying to engage your workforce, it helps to know how engaged they already are, and you can do this by conducting an employee engagement survey and acting on the results. A key way to build momentum following your survey is to draw on your engagement ambassadors — employees who are already fully engaged and committed to your company.

To compete in a world where more and more products and services are commoditized more quickly than ever before, you have to up your game and deliver great customer experiences at every point of interaction in your business. A consistently great customer experience is very difficult to copy and may represent a sustainable competitive differentiator for your company!

An EDP (employee development plan) is one good way to encourage engagement in your workforce. So, how do you use an EDP? Here's a breakdown: The manager completes the EDP forms.This step includes providing an assessment of the employee’s past performance, as well as a road map for the future. (The manager can partner with his HR manager as needed for guidance writing effective goals, providing reinforcing and constructive feedback, and so on.

Following are tools you can use to gauge your progress on each step of improving customer experience, enabling you to see what you’ve done so far and get a handle on what still needs to be accomplished. Feel free to copy these tools and use them in your efforts to improve customer experience in your own organization!

Mapping your customer’s journey can provide you with a clearer understanding of his experience with your organization. Essentially, you produce a visual representation or “story” of the customer’s interactions with your company. Journey mapping yields the following benefits: It enables you to identify whether (and where) you may be confusing customers.

You've probably heard the term brand ambassador. A brand ambassador is someone who embodies a brand and serves to promote it. Similarly, an engagement ambassador embodies engagement and serves to promote it. Hopefully, your organization is brimming with people who might serve as brand ambassadors. These are people who are visibly engaged and committed to your organization.

Group development leads to engagement in the workforce. Here is an idea useful to helping you understand how to keep your team engaged. In 1965, psychologist Dr. Bruce Tuckman proposed a model of group development that he called “Tuckman’s Stages.” This model included four stages: Stage 1: Forming Stage 2: Storming Stage 3: Norming Stage 4: Performing To help you understand this model, here’s an example: Suppose you and your partner decide to have a child.

Customer experience is a dynamic discipline. It's always evolving, so you have to make an effort to stay on top of things! Here, you find several suggestions for additional customer experience resources.You'll notice that a great many of them are blogs. Fortunately, the community of bloggers who focus on customer experience is extremely open and sharing!

Want to improve your own customer experience delivery in a hurry? Here are ten things you can change today that will make an instantaneous impact on your customer interactions. Be patient. Patience, as they say, is a virtue — and it’s one that people who deal with customers must have in buckets. Here are some tips for dipping into your inner well of patience when dealing with a difficult customer (or other work frustrations): Take a deep breath and let it out slowly.