Q&A: Lyft On Its Customer-Centric Culture, Employee Journey Mapping

Earlier this week, we shared our "industry disruptor" Q&A with Jennifer Hyman of Rent The Runway.

Today, we're thrilled to share notes from our conversation with Lyft Global Head of Partner and WFM Tim Galarza.

Like Hyman, Galarza will be speaking at CCW Fall this October.

Most contact center leaders are focused on creating a culture that inspires excellence. Can you tell us how you take it one step further with a unique approach to measurement?

The first step is to define culture and what it means to your company. It’s also important to measure both good culture – and bad culture. Good culture elevates performance; bad culture pulls you down. As we focus on developing customer centric brand advocates, it’s important to align culture, leverage new and traditional contact center metrics and scale for increased demand.

In recent years, customer journey mapping has become very popular. What can you tell us about your employee journey mapping?

Yes, customer journey mapping is really important as we need to understand our customers’ interaction with the brand across all touch points. At Lyft, we’ve been looking within and “mapping” the employee journey. This enables us to define culture through the lens of our employees. We can clearly track goals, accomplishments, and challenges.

Millennials demand a balance between their work and personal lives.  Can you tell us about your unique strategy for leading and retaining the Millennials?

Millennials currently make up a large percentage of the U.S. contact center agent workforce.  We developed a program for retaining the existing agent workforce and recruiting new agents when turnover occur.  We believe agents should be empowered with scheduling flexibility, as long as it does not hurt the business. We adopted a schedule-change empowerment program that enables self-directed schedule-change capability.