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Customer experience and employee experience is completely connected. When your employees are happy, they’re more willing to go the extra mile for your customer. When your employees are more engaged, they’re more willing to collaborate with those in the organization to make whatever it is they’re trying to solve or do even better. When your employees understand what’s happening in the business, they’re willing to bring forth great ideas so you can improve the performance of the business.
The Experience Mindset
It was maybe 2019, I decided to embark on some new research to try to figure out how can companies grow in a much more predictable way, and understanding the connection between what employees are able to do and capable of doing and how that impacts the experience a customer has with a particular company. We found early on that there was this virtuous cycle between happy employees leads to happy customers. You get those two things right, you find yourself with greater growth.
We thought it didn’t matter where you started on that virtuous cycle. Actually, it has to start with employee. The fastest way to get customers to love your brand is to get employees to love their job. If your employees aren’t happy, there’s no way to get the lift or the improvement in growth on the customer side. So when we realized that it had to start with employee to kick off that virtuous cycle of happy employee, happy customer, get those two things right, greater growth rate, we knew we were onto something. When an employee touches a customer right at that intersection, that’s where the goodness is, and that’s where the focus of the experience mindset began.
Paying Attention to Expectations
When we crossed the threshold into the digital revolution, we found ourselves really trying to reduce the effort for customer, and unfortunately, the effort for the employee went up. So we want to make sure that the expectation is something we’re paying attention to. Make no mistake, the expectation of customers will continue to go up. I mean, back at 2000, it might’ve been you need to click 10 things to place an order. Today, it’s one click or it’s voice. It was five-day delivery, three-day delivery, two-day delivery, one-day delivery, same-day delivery. Now, two-hour delivery. We continue to chase that expectation for the customer that continues to get higher. Well, you may be the most customer-centric company on the planet, but I’m driving my delivery truck in 105 degree temperature with no air conditioning so that you can hit your two-hour delivery commitment.
This is where I saw companies really get out of alignment, that the effort and expectation for the customer was always put first, and the employee was somewhere after that. They so over-prioritized customer that employees, many of them in their organizations, not all, but many of them have said, enough is enough. So we want to make sure intention and effort and expectation, all of those things try to stay in as much alignment as possible. Now, it will never be perfect. It will never be 50/50, but if you stop for a second and go, hold on, are we getting out of alignment? Are we chasing one expectation at the expense of another? How do we create an operating philosophy that puts some thought behind both constituents in a more equal and scalable way so we can create a more resilient organization for both our employees and our customers? Because in the end, the company will be much better for it.
Three Ways to Integrate CX and EX
So to put an experience mindset in practice, you have to be able to integrate the customer and employee experience. One way to do that is to say, what are the things we’re doing right now for our customer? For example, do we have a customer advisory board? Have we journey-mapped or tracked what do our customers have to do to buy something from us, or return a product, or have a service call, whatever it might be, right? Start to really look at what are the things we’re doing for the customer? Do you have a correlating similar thing for your employees? Is there an employee advisory board, et cetera?
Integrating the two would be you find out something from one side of the business, and how do you share that with the other side of the business? And how do you start to create a feedback loop between those two groups in such a way that you’re able to look for opportunities for improvement, as well as things that you may need to stop doing. Integration can also be at the process layer. What you have your customers do versus what you have your employees do. Could be in the systems and tools that you may expose to your customer, like an app that they may order from you on your phone. Then what’s the backend that an employee will actually have to touch in order to make what the customer did on that app come to life? If you’re going to do something for customer, what is the intended or unintended consequence to your employees? And if you’re going to do something for employees, what’s the intended or unintended consequence to your customers?
So there are integration points up and down the stack, both at a human level, a technology level, and a process level. But the only way you can uncover what that is is you have to make sure that you have an equal set of effort and metrics, right, and groups and teams and feedback loops in both of those groups so that you get that integration really, really tight.