Employee Experience Is Just As Important As Customer Experience

The age of Customer Experience (CX) has arrived. Regardless of which industry you’re in, or the kind of business you run, there’s no doubt that customer experience is one of the most important considerations for your team.

Everywhere you look, companies are measuring first call resolution, tracking customer journeys, and leveraging AI for better customer interactions. But customer experience isn’t the only experience you should be thinking about.

Your employees are the most valuable asset your business has. Each talented member of staff in your team is responsible for generating endless sales, completing countless crucial tasks, and perhaps most importantly, delivering amazing customer service.

The more empowered, supported, and informed your team members are, the better the quality of experience you can give your customers.

Here’s why employee experience is just as crucial as CX.

What Is ‘EX’ and Why Is It Important?

Employee Experience or EX refers to the art of measuring, improving, and optimising the experiences your team members have every day.

A great employee experience is defined by things like good communication between team members, access to high-quality technology, and fantastic engagement. Anything that empowers and assists your team, boosts EX.

Studies show when organisations excel at employee experience, they can achieve twice the customer satisfaction, double the innovation, and become four times more profitable.

Think of delivering the ideal customer experience as like baking and serving a delicious cake. Your employees are the chefs creating your culinary masterpiece. Their skills, combined with the right ingredients (technology, tools, and processes) directly influence what you hand over to your customer.

About 80% of executives agree employee experience is either important, or very important to a business’s success.

Aside from improving customer experience, employee experience also influences:

• Employee Engagement: Great experiences lead to more engaged employees, who produce a higher quality of work, at a faster rate. Engaged employees are more productive and more beneficial for your company’s bottom line.

• Recruitment and Retention: Today’s talented professionals can work from anywhere, for almost any business. Your company needs to stand out to attract and retain the right workers. A good employee experience helps to reduce staff churn, so you can keep your top-performing employees around for longer.

• Profit Margins: A strong employee experience determines how much money your business can make. An analysis into more than 250 global organisations found companies with the highest employee experience scores achieve four times higher profits, 40% lower turnover, and two times higher average revenue.

How Do You Improve Employee Experience?

Just as today’s companies build extensive strategies for customer experience, it’s also important to have the right plan in place for ensuring good employee experience. You can influence the experience your staff has with your company at every stage of your employer/employee relationship.

When you’re attracting talent to your team, an excellent employee experience can help you to showcase a compelling company culture, and an attractive employer brand, ideal for reaching a wider range of candidates. Once you’ve attracted the right team members, you can focus on delivering powerful experiences through:

Onboarding:

An amazing onboarding experience helps your employees to get a feel for your company quickly, so they can start delivering results as soon as possible. Strong onboarding experiences also have an impact on the tenure of your staff members.

Employee Management:

Managing your employees with a focus on delivering good employee experiences paves the way to better communication between supervisors and teams. This can lead to a better company culture and a more confident group of employees.

Development and Support:

Companies can enhance the employee experience by consistently investing in the development of their employees. This not only makes staff members happier, it also ensures you have access to all the right skillsets in your team.

Here are some of the things you’ll need to ensure excellent employee experiences:

1. Clear Policies

Employees often have a better experience at work when they know exactly what’s expected of them, and how their performance is going to be evaluated. Creating strong policies for how you’re going to manage and support your teams helps to form the foundation of a good company culture.

Clear policies and procedures also make it easier for managers to watch over and support their staff, without micro-managing or being too overbearing. Establishing the right expectations from day one can even make it easier to manage a hybrid working model.

Make sure that everyone from the business leaders in your company to the latest hires understands the values and priorities of your business.

2. The Right Technology

Today, running a successful business demands an investment in the right technology. This is particularly true when you’re improving employee experience. Staff need access to the right technology to keep them productive, informed, and efficient in any environment.

The right tech can also make it easier to keep staff members engaged, by helping them to track their own performance, or even compete against their colleagues.

Dashboards and analytics tools measuring KPIs on first call resolution or customer satisfaction help employees to benchmark their performance against colleagues. These tools also show supervisors and managers which teams need more help and training.

Don’t forget to invest in the right communication technology too. The right apps and services for communication and collaboration help everyone to feel like part of the team. This sense of community spirit is crucial to good employee experiences, particularly in the remote working world.

3. A Strong Feedback Loop

Perhaps the best way to ensure that you are delivering the kind of meaningful experiences your staff members are looking for, is to listen to them. Provide an easy way for employees to share their thoughts on how you can make working easier and more satisfying for them.

Listening to your staff about matters such as which tools and tech investments they think would help them, or which training sessions they’d like to look into can be precious.

Combined with the data and statistics you get from tracking your team’s performance, a good feedback loop helps you to make valuable decisions for the future of your workforce. Employees are even more likely to stick around if they think their needs and requirements are being taken seriously.

Ready to Master Employee Experience?

Succeeding in this rapidly evolving digital landscape doesn’t just mean understanding the importance of customer experience. Tomorrow’s market leaders are the companies that recognise the connection between EX and CX.