Aligning your employee experience with the customer experience

– ensure that employees have a voice to share insights productively

The collective efforts, knowledge and aspirations of your people can be a source of strength and competitive leverage if harnessed properly. By putting people first, you are well-placed to deliver a Voice of Customer (VOC) programme with the active support of your employees, whose satisfaction with the internal Voice of Employee (VOE) programme will translate into a willing army of customer-focused individuals desirous of projecting your brand and striving to build and sustain a customer-centric culture.

Employees will sell the brand zealously if they believe they have a voice. Putting people first is about two sides of the same coin. On one side is the customer whose needs you are keen to prioritise and on the other is the employee who engages the customer regularly on the front lines and the need to keep them satisfied. People have aspirations and are desirous of being part of something. More importantly, they want to be heard. If customers are yearning to be heard, so do employees want to be heard as well. Keeping the right balance between the two is critical to managing the experience.

In reality, it is possible to have a VOC programme without a VOE programme but to do that will most likely deprive you of valuable information and knowledge about the customer that could be a game-changer. This requires that you complement your VOC programme matched by a well-drilled internal VOE programme to keep things in balance. Studies show that happy employees translate directly into more loyal, satisfied customers and increased revenue. An effective VoE programme will enhance employee engagement, and motivate staff to be more involved, and productive in customer affairs.

Ricardo Semler owner of Semco in Brazil treats all employees like responsible adults. Most of them, factory workers included, set their own working hours. They all have access to the company books. The vast majority vote on many important corporate decisions. Everyone gets paid by the month, regardless of job description, and more than 150 of its management people set their own salaries and bonuses. Undoubtedly, this is an extreme case. However, the fact that the employees are so empowered actually accounts for the company’s success story in the main.

Taking a cue from Semco’s approach let’s consider the following scenario. Where employees function in a democratic environment supportive of customer-centricity, there are going to be happier workers than those who don’t have comparable privileges. Researchers opine that about 90 percent of the time, participatory management is just hot air regardless of how good the intentions are. Implementing employee involvement can be extremely frustrating; and so in most cases, it is easier to talk about than to do.

There are some very telling actions that, when pursued by any business, will improve the customer experience very significantly. Companies must be deliberate about how they align employees to the experience agenda. First, the employee experience must start right at the point of recruitment – how an employee thinks, feels, learns and does during their work life or journey is critical to developing the experience. Second, formalise the employee experience internally to enhance the employee journey. Third, listen to employees and empathise with them. Fourth, develop purpose-built reward systems.

Employee experience starts at the recruitment

The goal is to attract and hire the right talent in the right way. The recruitment stage must involve everything needed for the new employee. When the recruitment process is fair and is clear in terms of what expectations are from both sides (employee and employer), it leaves a positive impression on the new recruit and draws attention to the fact that being part of the team is something special. Keep them up to speed with systems, tools and processes, and make clear what the new role entails.

A transparent recruitment process translates the new recruit’s initial enthusiasm for their new job into a more meaningful, long-term connection to the brand and a commitment to doing great things at work enamoured by positive employee experiences. Employees develop variously at different rates, so it is imperative to understand and master the employee experience by quantifying employee productivity, encapsulating such things as the ability to be a team player and promotion aspirations. There are also gender-sensitive issues that deserve close attention.

According to research by Qualtrics, 53 percent of employees agree that their company has been proactive about increasing the number of women in leadership roles at their company. There are specific needs that need to be addressed to make the average employee feel highly valued at the workplace.

There is a popular story on YouTube about a young man who walked to work on his first day at work because his car had broken down; however, he was determined not to disappoint his employers. As it turned out the Police noticed him on his way to work at dawn, and he had to leave early to make the journey which was not short by any stretch of the imagination. The Police offered to drive him after they had heard his story. To cut a long story short, his boss noticed the young man’s commitment and willingly offered his car as a gift for him to use. I bet that experience changed the young man’s life. He was even featured on Steve Harvey’s show.

This story is a little out of the ordinary; however, it portrays the profound effect on individuals when employers go out of their way to show that they care. The Ricardo Semler story mirrors this scenario in several ways. When employees feel valued, they fully integrate into the organisation. It improves the retention rate; when retention rates are strong, employees are motivated to perform, develop and contribute to the company’s success. Furthermore, they are inspired by and connected to the company’s vision.

Formalise the employee experience

Just as we refer to the customer journey and its impact on enhancing the visibility of your business, we can say the same about employees who enjoy the experience offered to them in their work environment. John Maxwell’s leadership axiom is a helpful one here. Everything rises and falls on leadership. A successful and meaningful employee experience starts from the top. Support for the employee experience from leadership will boost performance very significantly and will influence their ability to deliver employee experience-related deliverables.

Leadership focuses on employee experience management as well as support from the organisation in areas such as training, coaching and mentoring. Support will influence a strong employee experience to garner some good performances plus a desire to support the customer experience agenda proactively. One way to do this is to conduct employee surveys to garner data about employee sentiments so that leadership can make informed decisions regarding customer-related employee issues. The way forward with this is to be creative about how you measure employee satisfaction.

Consider this approach, instead of using an annual survey to measure employee satisfaction, you can instead gather employee feedback routinely through the employee lifecycle with regular pulse surveys for capturing real-time employee issues or concerns. Some recommended approaches for addressing employee commitment include the Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) to measure how an employee is likely to recommend her workplace to a friend. There is also the Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) to let employees know that you have heard their concerns.

This will typically address such things as how comfortable or satisfied they are with the work environment. There exists a plethora of tools to equip us with capabilities to elicit employee sentiments so that we can implement policies to improve the employee experience overall. Insights into how employees feel about the workplace, their roles, and their customer understanding will enable leadership to rethink the experience journey from an organisational perspective.

Listening to employees

An individual customer can only share her experience with your product or service. On the contrary, an employee who interacts with scores of customers will have a clearer understanding of customer experience. they can rely on their experience to intuitively spot patterns as opposed to identifying an isolated CX issue. This puts the individual in a great position to spot recurring issues and suggests process-wide improvements to help all customers at once. Relying on their deep insights when dealing with customers can be of immense value to the business.

How you make employees feel inside the company, the access to benefits and the positive influence of leadership is pivotal to making employees feel valued. They feel heard by leadership or supported by them. How effectively Human Resources is digging deep to support employees and how they feel will have a great impact on the employee experience. The Google Garage concept demonstrates a deliberate effort at making employees feel valued where everything is on wheels to help create the most flexible, fun and innovative workspace possible.

“The result is a collaborative workspace that thrives on crazy collaborative ideas,” in their words. That environment generates free idea-sharing. Think about what that means to any organisation in terms of employees having a voice. Frontline staff have the opportunity to share their customer interactions with their colleagues informally. According to recent research by Gartner, 64 percent of customer-facing employees say that “unnecessary effort” prevents them from delivering a higher-quality experience for customers. This is anything an employee does regularly that feels to them to be overly complex or repetitive.

According to the findings, customer-centricity is not just about getting employees to care more, but is also about enabling employees with the right capabilities. The quest to deliver out-of-world experiences for customers must also include the employee experience (EX). The goal is to promote active listening to find out from your employees by asking questions like “What is stopping you?” or “What is getting in your way?” This will help leaders understand the intent behind what employees are voicing. A system of closed-loop feedback ensures that the individuals providing the feedback feel they have been heard.

Reward systems

Companies must acknowledge internal pain points and recognise the employees who solve them and encourage them to share feedback. Leaders must reciprocate this by demonstrating the company will do the work to address their issues. By identifying, escalating and removing employee barriers to CX improvements through the institution of CX rewards and recognition programmes or in other visible, company-wide fora, the tone is set for creating an environment that motivates employees who excel in CX.

Research points to huge numbers of workdays lost every year due to workplace stress. Turn this on its head and the story is that positive feedback for good work consistently leads to better employee performance. It has been proven that recognition has a positive impact on the mood of employees. To cap this further, it has been established that happiness leads to 31 percent higher productivity, with 19 percent higher accuracy in completing tasks. The assertion is that happy employees who are recognised for putting their all into something are much more likely to do so again!

The key is to offer rewards genuinely and be humble enough to admit that you wish you had offered them sooner. Your honesty will be appreciated besides you setting precedence for a culture of trust as well as a culture of recognition at the same time. We have an activity in our training sessions, dubbed ‘Trust and Fall’, where we have participants choose a partner and let themselves fall, trusting that the partner will catch them; thus, preventing them from falling to the floor. Where there is a high level of trust, it ultimately leads to greater employee engagement and better financial performance.

On the contrary, those with trust issues suffer from decreased productivity, high turnover rates, and lower profits. The level of trust within your organisation can have a profound impact on business results. There is no one-size-fits-all answer to this question. Just be creative about how you think through new programmes from different angles. The Internet has made the world a global village. This calls for cultural sensitivity when planning and executing rewards. In all this, the goal is to make the employee feel valued and ultimately to pass on this good feeling to the customer.