Canadian HR Strategy

13 A bout one year ago, Kelly Harper was approached by the chief learning offi cer at BMO Bank of Montreal to spearhead a new learning and development area at the company — customer experience learning. "People are talking about customer experience as the new frontier," said Harper, director of cus- tomer experience learning. "Great customer expe- rience is understanding: What is your customer ex- perience strategy? What do you deliver? How can you diff erentiate? Who are your core customers?" And employee engagement is the foremost element of BMO's value chain in creating an excellent customer experience, she said. "We believe engaged employees will deliver great customer experi- ences, great customer experiences draw loyalty, loyalty is important to us because we know that loyal customers buy more, stay longer, refer family and friends —and that drives growth." e starting point is fi guring out how to engage those employees so they want to deliver those great experiences — and enabling them to do so. To engage its 47,000 employees, BMO does customer experi- ence journey mapping to actually map out the steps and touchpoints a customer might have within a specifi c experience. It starts with employees by asking them, "What is the experience you deliver to the customer and why do you think it's important to them?" Next, it asks customers "What is the actual experience you're getting and what is important to you?" en it brings the two together and identifi es gaps, said Harper. It's really important that all employees participate in the customer experience journey, not just the customer-facing employees, she said. " ey may not be talking to customers everyday but maybe they create the website that helps the front-line employee deliver that great experience or maybe they create the website that distributes your product — all that's important," said Harper. "When you think of the customer experience, it's everything within the organization, not just the service side." e farther away employees are from the customer, the harder it is for them to make the connection to their work. So BMO has employ- ees write down how many steps are between them and the customer to see how close they really are. e next step is focusing on how the company will be deliberately designing or re-engineering existing experiences. Iterative ideation is a critical component, said Harper. "Do you have a culture in your organization that says, 'You know what? Eighty per cent is OK. Let's go with that and make it better as we go.' By the time it's perfect, it's outdated," she said. "It's OK to fail and learn from those failures." Measurement is a key principle to developing a customer expe- rience-driven organization. Employers need to take a hard look at whether they are actually measuring what they want to get done, said Harper. For example, a common call centre metric is average call handle time, but that might not be the best metric to have if the company is striving to create a better customer experience. "First-call problem resolution might be a better metric because it's all about solving the needs of the customer in the moment," said Harp- er. "So you want to make sure your metrics aren't counterintuitive to PHOTO: CHRIS WATTIE / REUTERS

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