Jo Kelly, Chief Customer Officer for Good2Give, explains how great employee experiences create great customer experiences.
Good2Give is a digital platform that facilitates charitable giving between corporations and charities. Good2Give’s customers are segmented into three levels of corporate clients, donors, and charities. They help companies run their workplace giving programs, manage employee donations and provide advice on how corporates and charities can work together to support their communities.
Since 2001, Good2Give has facilitated $225 million to more than 8,000 Australian and international communities.
Jo’s role at Good2Give encompasses a broad range of tasks and responsibilities. ‘I look after everything involved with sales, marketing, customer experience and managing and improving the processes that support those business functions. I have found it interesting and to some extent challenging handling all three areas under one job role.”
Prior to joining Good2Give Jo Kelly had a diverse career working for a range of companies from telecoms to media agency to recruitment. She believes that to be successful at CX you need broad exposure to all areas of the business so you can understand how those different areas affect the customer. “I think it’s important to get as much experience as possible under the belt in a range of industries and organisations. It helps you understand the main challenges when fixing the internal process that don’t serve the customer well.
Process improvement and customer journey mapping
“One thing I immediately noticed when I started were the gaps in the processes for engaging clients. There were obvious tension points in the process that needed to be resolved if we were to improve customer engagement. Removing these tension points would essentially free up people and resources to focus on more valuable work”.
Jo works extensively with her teams to encourage people not just to focus on the tasks at hand but also contribute to process improvement. “For the first time the organisation has started customer journey mapping where we’re mapping every process. We then review every process looking for improvement pieces we can find.”
Something that is also being explored through the journey mapping and process review is looking at where the real value can be added when we’re working with clients. . “It can be easy in the not-for-profit sector for clients to be over-serviced at some points of engagement . I’m trying to get people focused on engagement for the right reasons by providing value added services and support and meeting their needs, rather than just checking in with the client to see where they are at.”
Improving the employee experience
“If you’ve got dissatisfied staff or morale is low, it shows in every single customer interaction. You can hear it people’s voices and you can see it in their behavior and body language – you see this in all organisations and it’s often the first sign that something isn’t working as well as it should. A big focus for us is to remove basic pain points in our business that are frustrating our employees and allow them to have more time and energy to improve the customer experience”.
Though the link between employees and happy customers and therefore business growth, is undeniable, many organisations struggle when it comes to engaging their employees and providing them with an exceptional workplace experience. Jo comments, “One of the hardest things to turn around in a large corporate is employee engagement. For a lot of the large corporates it’s like turning around the Titanic and they struggle to think about programs around employee engagement that lift metrics – there are so many great cloud-based tools available that can give you a heads-up on emerging issues so you can resolve them quickly”.
Jo believes patience and diplomacy as well as a good dose of courage are vital to her role. “When you come in as an outsider and start questioning everything and why things are done the way they are, you’ve got to make sure that people don’t feel like they’ve been criticized for what they’ve done in the past. You’re asking because you’re focused on process improvement. You need to get buy-in from everyone, where they trust you and feel safe to share their thoughts.”
