At Efteling, a Dutch theme park, there is a rule for when employees see children crying because they aren’t tall enough to go on a ride. If that happens, employees should let the crying children help check if the other attendees are secure in their seats. The kids forget their sadness instantly and are ready to spend the rest of the day having fun.
This rule hasn’t always been in place. In 2015 an employee spontaneously handed over her vest to a crying kid to cheer him up. This video got spread around fast and the employee’s action became standard procedure in the whole park. Ever since then, lots of kids have been incredibly proud to be ‘working’ at a theme park.
A bit more recently, a working student was sceptical about the use of plastic bags at Kruidvat, a Dutch drugstore chain, while delivering products to their stores. At the beginning of 2019, Katja Diepstraten, responsible for filling the shelves, posted a picture of the plastic bags to LinkedIn: “We can do better”.
One of her teachers tagged Marcel Evers, the regional manager at Kruidvat’s distribution centre, who then invited Katja for a conversation. Everything moved quickly from there. Katja came up with the idea to reuse the plastic bags and now Kruidvat saves about one million plastic bags per year.
Katja lets everyone know that she’s glad that she’s been listened to and that she’s had such an impact on the company. A lot of money is being saved and there have been many positive responses on social media. This is very important, since word-of-mouth marketing can account up to a 13% increase of your sales and people are 90% more likely to buy from a brand that was recommended to them by friends.
Source: Vantage Circle (https://blog.vantagecircle.com/employee-engagement-concept-re-defined/)
Some companies have a shadow board with young employees who sit together to try and think of new ways to improve. They usually have less experience, but that’s why they can come up with new ideas.
This way, the shadow board of the Finnish company Stora Enso changed the way the work was distributed within the company. At first, experts were assigned for specific tasks, but now some tasks are also given to non-experts. They have less prejudices, which increases the chances of a breakthrough. A team of non-experts came up with a new plan within six months in which the lead time of the supply chain was strongly reduced.
Optimising business to create the right experience for your customer, requires making your employees part of that process too. It could be surprising which insights they can provide. With Hello Customer you can easily ask your employees for feedback and use their knowledge as a source of community insights for your entire organisation.
As the examples above show, this can greatly impact your business's performance. On top, you'll show your teams that your value their input. And as we all know: engaged employees make for satisfied customers. You can always find some tips & tricks for great employee engagement in our e-book.
If you want to know more about how you can use Hello Customer to leverage employee wisdom, we're always ready for a chat! 👇
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