Customer-driven success: fun factor for employees often still missing

Fun factor is crucial for customer-driven behavior change

Behavioral psychologists agree: the overriding reason employees sustain certain behaviors is that they simply enjoy the behaviors themselves. Direct pleasure experiences while performing work ensure that we achieve our goals. Although people themselves think they persevere in their behavior because of a long-term goal, research shows that it is actually because of the fun of the activity itself. This is a crucial insight for organizations planning to become more successful with customer-driven behavior. You can come up with a great Customer Experience program, but if employees do not experience the actual activities as "fun," customer-driven behavior will not improve sustainably.

Only 15% really enjoy customer-driven behavior

The National Customer Drivenness Monitor, a study by Blauw and CYS among nearly 600 organizations in the Netherlands, shows that enthusing and facilitating employees is not yet at the desired level.

For example, only 9% of organizations are in the highest phase of customer-driven action: "transforming. The fun factor of customer-driven action is still limited. Only 15% state that employees really enjoy working with customer feedback. The long-term goals are clear, but that does not yet mean that employees feel invited and enjoy customer-driven behavior.

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Customer-driven fun varies by sector

The sector an organization is in correlates with the fun employees have with customer-driven behavior. The healthcare and government sectors, for example, have less fun working with customer feedback than other sectors. It is also striking that organizations from transportation and logistics score most positively on this fun factor, a crucial condition for behavioral change.

How can we make customer-driven behavior even more fun?

An important tip in finding "fun" behavior is to let each employee figure out for themselves what their personal behavior change is going to be. In doing so, managers can inspire with example behavior and success cases, but if the person themselves chooses the behavior they like (read: is good at and energizes) the chances of a successful change are many times greater.

If the desired behaviors for more customer-driven success are not yet fun enough in the eyes of employees, then the challenge is to set up initiatives that bring in the fun. Some real-world examples:

• Gamification: Dashboards are often boring and functional. Help employees see the fun in customer feedback by communicating tantalizing and rewarding content in your Voice of the Customer dashboard. Think for example: the best compliment of the day, the Superpromoter of the week, the most fanatical follow-up of the month, the employee with the most promoters, the coolest improvement action of the quarter!
• Surprise budget: Give all employees (especially those without regular customer contact) 100 euro budget to spend as they see fit for a customer, as mortgage lender Obvion, among others, successfully did.
• Immerse in customer-driven action: Organize a hackaton or Flow24, working with your team in 24 hours continuously on one customer improvement action. Super efficient and extremely good for the customer-driven mindset in the organization.

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With everything, share the customer experience successes that employees achieve. By doing so, you not only compliment the customer-driven employees themselves, but also inspire other colleagues. In this way, you help employees to see why it is so nice to work structurally on the customer-drivenness of your organization.