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Thread CX to EX
According to executives, metrics are the lifeblood of the business. According to their employees, that’s not the case. Metrics sometimes create an environment where employees may not do what’s best for the business because they’re managing their time to the metric. Sometimes metrics reward great behavior and it actually inspires people to do more. So, you get one side or the other.
But metrics are a way to actually thread together different parts of the organization. In many ways, the employee metrics sit with human resources. In many ways, the customer metrics sit with the chief marketing officer or the marketing group, or if you’re large enough, you may have a customer organization, but it doesn’t thread the two together. So the experience mindset being about a philosophical change means that you actually have to have a metric that is threaded between the pieces and parts of the company that have impact on those two groups.
So how could you tie together human resources, IT, the customer group, maybe training and learning? Let’s just pick those four to begin with. What would be the right metric to get everyone to understand what’s important? It could be something like a net promoter score. And then the correlating one would be an ENPS or employee net promoter score. Now, all of a sudden, if you tie those two things together, you’ve touched both parts of the organization that in many ways don’t communicate.
Act on EX data
One of the most troubling statistics that came out of the research that was the foundation for “The Experience Mindset” was the fact that a majority of organizations survey and collect data on their employees, and – wait for it – do nothing with it. So your employees are telling you something. They say, “Listen, I’m not really happy or satisfied about this part of my job.” And as executives, unfortunately, what’s happening is they check the box and go, “Of course we do employee surveys.” But when they get that data, when the employees are telling them, “Hey, I need help. Hey, I’m burning out. Hey, the tools I’m using are not working effectively,” and you do nothing with them, it breaks trust between the employee and the organization.
So if you are going to survey your people and capture the data, please do something with it. Now, maybe it means you don’t need to ask 25 questions. Maybe you ask one, two, or three. Get very specific about a very specific tactic that an employee does. For example, in the call center, maybe you ask, “Hey, I just noticed you closed that ticket. How easy or difficult was it for you to do that? On a scale of one to five, five being really difficult, one being really easy.” and all of a sudden consistently you have a score of 4.5, where across your call center, your people feel like it is not easy to close that ticket, but you are asking them to close 100 tickets a day. So if you now know that information, you can actually have a focused effort to improve how do you make it easier for them to close that ticket. If you’d ask them 25 questions, would you have found that one pain point in that role, in that part of the business, one that is highly critical to your long-term success? I’d argue, probably not.
So we have to be not only better at asking and getting and capturing those answers, but we have to get better at doing something with them so you can make meaningful changes to the day-to-day of your people. So let’s make sure that when thinking about metrics, you don’t just fall back on those you’re comfortable managing and measuring. Make sure they have some meaning to other parts of the company. That’s how you get true collaboration cross-functionally, and you’re able to align better. You’re also able to build a more resilient organization, and, more importantly, you’ll end up having happier employees because they understand how their role every single day plays a part in the success of a company.