Will 2015 be the year of employee engagement?

With the rise of the omnichannel customer, employee engagement, as a strategy, is one that has gathered momentum over the last 18 months.    

Met by a need to understand and measure the emotional factors which influence customers’ buying decisions, many organisations are starting to recognise there is a direct correlation between engaged employees, customer satisfaction and business performance, and are assessing the best methods for connecting the dots more effectively as a result.

Bruce Temkin, managing partner at Temkin Group and chair of the Customer Experience Professionals Association believes this gathering momentum, alongside customer expectations for being able to experience deeper engagement with organisations, will lead to employee engagement featuring far more prominently on the agenda of customer experience leaders in 2015.

In announcing his annual list of customer experience trends for 2015, Temkin has called to name 2015 "The Year of the Employee", and give the topic more gravitas.

"As companies increasingly focus on customer experience in 2015, they'll recognise the need to make internal changes," he says.

"In 2015, successful customer experience efforts will realise that the key ingredient to success is their employees."

Temkin's list of customer experience trends for 2015 include:

1. Corporate Culture Conversations
“Great things can happen when culture is aligned with the objectives of an organisation. In 2015, we expect to see even more executives trying to build a customer-centric culture.”

2. CX Training & Engagement
“In 2015, as companies look to provide clear CX orientation to their employees, we expect to see a sharp increase in the demand for CX training courses.”

3. Voice of the Customer Renovations
“One of the most powerful forces inside an organization is clear feedback from customers. In 2015, we expect a lot of companies to evaluate and revamp their voice of the customer programs.”

4. Mobile Mobile Mobile Formulations
“In 2015, we'll see more collaborative economy activity from providers such as Uber and Airbnb, as well as an increase of traditional companies embedding mobile devices into their existing offerings and operational processes.”

5. Brand (R)evaluations
“We expect that in 2015, many companies will hit this brand wall and recognise the need to re-evaluate their brands.”

6. Customer Journey Deliberations
“In 2015, we expect to see many more companies using customer journey maps, and we expect more mature organisations to adopt the customer journey mindset.”

7. Contact Centre Loyalty Aspirations
“In 2015, we expect many organisations to extract insights from their contact center interactions using text analytics and speech analytics.”

8. Human Resources Participation
“In 2015, as employees become the central focus, we'll see some HR groups stepping up to drive key areas of the CX transformation within their companies, including the critical focus on employee engagement.”