Your employees can make smarter business decisions if they take your customers into account.
Product managers and engineers can better prioritize the products/services they should build. Marketers can create ads that better speak to customer’s preferences. And employees in HR can recruit and hire people who they think will be thoughtful and empathetic about the customer’s needs.
Employees themselves can also benefit from their relationship with customers. According to our research, 76% of employees who think their work impacts customers find their job meaningful—a 27 point improvement from those who don’t think their work impacts customers!
To foster a high level of customer focus, your colleagues first need to understand who your customers are.
You can educate them by running an internal blog that showcases a variety of customer stories. One way to source these stories is by asking your customer-facing employees to write posts about positive and negative experiences customers have and highlight the different ways they use your product/service.
Based on our own experiences, we’ll walk you through 3 key steps for launching one of these blogs at your organization!
How SurveyMonkey builds a customer centric culture
Learn about the 6 initiatives we run to help our team feel closer to customers.
Empower customer-facing employees to contribute
Your customer blog is only as valuable as the stories it hosts. Detailed and informative content helps your employees better understand how their work contributes to the customer experience; poorly-written, unhelpful content won’t bring your team any closer to customers.
You can encourage your customer-facing employees to write thoughtful stories—and enough of them!—with these 5 tips and tricks:
- Provide a general list of requirements for each story (types of customers, length of content, information to include, etc.).
- Run contests that reward employees who submit the most interesting and valuable stories.
- Offer small rewards for each story submission—like a gift card or company swag.
- Require every employee to submit at least one story per quarter or bi-annually.
- Consistently remind employees to submit their story via email or other channels.
Promote a diversity of client stories
A wide-range of customer stories allows your employees to have a more nuanced and balanced understanding of customers.
To ensure your blog effectively showcases different customer experiences, ask every customer-facing employee to contribute to it (support reps, customer success managers, account managers, etc.) Each client-facing team has a unique relationship with its clients, making them naturally inclined to write different types of stories.
You can further encourage different types of customer stories by asking each employee to refrain from writing about the same customer more than once.
Make your blog highly visible and accessible
At SurveyMonkey, we host our blog on our internal Wiki, a site that any of our employees can visit to get updates and learn about the company.
We give the blog high visibility within the Wiki by having a “Customer” tab at the top of the homepage—which takes readers directly to the blog.
Once an employee is on the blog homepage, they can find the most recent articles published. They can also use the filters on the side of the page to sort the articles by the product(s) that are relevant to them, the length of the content piece, and the industry the client works in.
In summary, you can give your internal blog exposure to your entire organization by:
- Sharing it in a place any employee can access, and where they tend to visit often
- Giving it a prominent space wherever it’s shared
- Including filters so employees can find the stories they’re looking for faster
Your team’s connection to customers can influence employee morale and the value your customers realize over time. Though several measures can and should be taken to improve this connection, a comprehensive, accessible, and constantly updated internal blog can, by itself, make a lasting impact.
