In early May, our Client Director Nicky Clark and Head of Consultancy Rika Banerji attended…
Customer experience is in its platinum age. Backed by decades of research, companies are achieving incredible results by investing in the tried-and-true practices of strategic CX. But a lesser-known secret, is that by enhancing EX with these proven consumer-grade techniques, employers can bring that longed for link between employee engagement and better business outcomes.
In addition to that, engaged and happy employees are more likely to go above and beyond for customers, show resilience when faced with challenges, and improve company profits. So, does it really make sense to keep CX and EX separate in 2023?
Here are 5 ways to bring your EX and CX strategy together.
- Think of your employees as another customer
When a customer has a problem, wants to get more value out of your product/service, or decides to leave for a competitor, how does a business respond? Customer care and solutions are usually formulated around what drives a customer’s decision making. But more importantly, good CX focuses on reimagining the service approach to differentiate their experience from everyone else’s, especially around crucial moments that matter.
So, what happens during these crucial moments that matter with employees? There’s an opportunity to reimagine the approach for solving problems, providing support and service, and how to respond with action quickly and often. Instead, companies are still relying on their annual engagement survey to both explore and solve their problems.
At McCann Synergy, we help companies create a human-centric employee experience to start shining a light on the incredible impact potential this new customer base can have on the bottom line.
- Take your customer experience map and recreate one for employees
2023 is earmarked as the year that EX becomes a more formalised global business imperative and formalising your EX doesn’t need to be a complicated process.
If you’re familiar with customer journey mapping, you’ll know that it enables businesses to create processes that are formed with the customer at the heart of everything. The journey is iterative, there’s room for trying new things, and it may evolve with how the customer interacts with the company.
When we map out employee’s experiences in this way, we start to see opportunities to improve across the lifecycle, generating proactive and holistic initiatives rather than creating policy or process in isolation. And we stop focusing all our attention on what other companies are doing about engagement and start creating bespoke solutions that slot into the culture and company strategy.
- CX teaches us to measure what matters
It’s a common mistake to assume that annual engagement survey questions should cover all facets of employment so we can better understand what’s going on. It’s a mammoth of a questionnaire and sometimes so onerous that incentives are required to get response rates up. And the slower the response for follow-up action plans and transparent progress reports, the fewer people will fill it in.
So, what does CX teach us about measurement? Firstly, take the pulse by having conversations. Reach out to employees face to face or over the phone and get a feel for what’s going on. Standardise your face-to-face questions to enhance your data and locate trends. Take them through workshops focused on specific parts of the lifecycle experiences to learn what’s working well, and not so well. Take direction from employees on what matters most to them and do it with empathy. Once you get a handle on these challenges, work it into the journey map and start brainstorming on solutions. After that, a feedback survey is an efficient tool for tracking success and progress. And at each step of your feedback collection process, locate quick wins and turn them into action. This will build trust in the process and more trust = richer data.
- Whoever owns your customer and employee experience need to talk ASAP
Delivering a world class customer experience should be the mission of every single employee but there’s something incredibly powerful in empowering frontline employees to deliver ‘wow’ experiences.
Customer facing employees are subject matter experts when it comes to what a customer wants, needs, and receives from a company. They experience frustrations with processes, both internally and externally, and often operate without enough autonomy to create and implement improvements to the experience customers are having.
The quickest path to empowerment is to gift employees with a little pocket of autonomy and a structured customer problem that they can noodle on. Allow some space to create experience owners across the organisation. The happy side effect of this? Engaged employees.
- Embed your CX and EX focus into the company strategy and culture
If you want to enact a meaningful transformation to the total experience, embed your efforts with purpose by taking the success metrics identified and making it everyone’s mission. Building teams around a shared purpose brings focus, energy, and innovation to a problem.
Embedding your focus on CX and EX could be an alignment to the reward and recognition process, internal communications, business development incentives, performance management process, training, product development and business development incentives, and more. Create smaller, action based initiatives, to get started while processes are updating.
Accelerate the employee experience transformation process
If you need a hand putting some of these ways of improving your employee experience into practice, we’re here to help.
Our Employee Experience (EX) Solution is based on design thinking – an iterative process that really gets to the heart of what your employees want and what the business needs to grow.
Email our Managing Director, Gemma McGrattan, at gemma.mcgrattan@mccannsynergy.com to discuss how we can help you create meaningful, valued experiences that fuel the customer experience (CX) and gives employees a reason to join, stay and progress their careers.
Kristin Hefferon, Senior Strategist
Kristin is passionate about helping businesses accelerate their objectives through an exceptional employee experience, where people can find meaning and purpose in their work, can deliver an incredible CX, and bring their full selves to work.
