There are many elements that need to be considered for improving Customer Experience, with some that are often overlooked – one of these being Employee Experience (EX). Like Customer Experience, it’s all about optimising every interaction along an employee’s journey, both online and offline, which will empower their staff to ensure they are delivering the best customer service and that any interaction users have with them creates a positive outcome.
It’s important for businesses to invest in their EX to improve their CX, as the former directly impacts the latter – so we’ve broken down what EX actually means, and the benefits for brands that make EX an important part of their business strategy.
What is employee experience?
EX is about more than just work perks and seasonal social events – it’s about how companies create, nurture and evolve a culture that’s employee-centric. A great experience helps everyone on the payroll to do their job as efficiently as possible and allows them to develop in their career. For most people, EX starts way before they’ve signed their contract. And the lasting impression of a company will stay with them long after they’ve moved on so it’s really important that companies get it right.
Understanding what matters
As with CX there are no one-size-fits-all answers to EX – every person will have their own thoughts on what creates an engaging culture, so making sure you’re finding out what the challenges are and creating opportunities that will be the most effective and efficient, is crucial.
Companies need to understand their employees as well as they try to understand their customers, and frequently ask the questions that will allow employees to honestly provide feedback that will improve employee satisfaction and in turn business growth areas such as:
Communication
Recognition
Flexibility
Transparency
Growth plans
Respect
You should be checking in with your employees and measuring their engagement almost as often as you are your customers. Regular pulse surveys that are short enough to not be a time-sponge, but broad enough to make sure you’re covering all of the areas that are important to your teams, is one way to measure the engagement and give you a chance to quickly act on any areas that are causing friction.
Check the information you do have to hand. Key signs that engagement is heading in the wrong direction include high absenteeism, reduced productivity and engagement and low retention. Gallup has reported that brands with actively engaged employees benefit from:
41% lower absenteeism
24% less turnover in high turn-over organisations
59% less turnover in low turn-over organisations
A digital hub or app is a fantastic tool to monitor engagement, giving your teams across the business a platform to share improvements and innovative ideas they would like to see, as well as the ability to comment on business news and views on an internal platform. This can give you the most valuable insight into how your employees are feeling, without you even having to ask.
Having the right tools for the job
PwC has reported that 90% of C-Suite executives say their company pays attention to people’s needs when introducing new technology and only 53% of staff agree.
EX can never be a top-down initiative, by understanding the development needs of your team and the challenges they face you’re more likely to create a culture that the entire workforce can get behind and will in turn create high-performing teams.
A fantastic example comes from our ongoing work with Microsoft to empower their workforce by creating technology that automates their media planning process, using data and machine learning to create time and cost efficiencies allowing the team to have more time to consult with their clients.
During this project we actively engaged the future users of the tools in upfront research to understand pain points and the subsequent testing of the product as we started to build out the solution, allowing us to iterate around their needs.
This inclusive and employee-centered approach is essential to ensuring that new products, initiatives, and solutions are well received and strongly adopted as a base of advocates have already been created within the workforce
How does good EX drive business growth?
Your employees are the lifeline of your business. Every touchpoint your customer has with your business, whether in-store, online, or over social media, there’s an employee that’s either making or breaking that customer experience. PwC has reported that 1 in 3 customers will walk away from a brand they love after one bad experience. Improving your Employee Experience is one way you can quickly reduce those bad experiences for your customers – because happy employees equal happy customers.
As part of their review into high-performing teams, Gallup has analysed the differences in performance between engaged and actively disengaged business/work units – those most engaged workforces were found to have:
10% higher customer ratings
17% higher productivity
20% higher sales
21% higher profitability
So, where can you start?
Creating the best experiences for your employees starts with collecting and understanding data and using it to create or evolve your plans with them at the centre. From new starters to retirees, you have to make every touchpoint count, and in turn, they will make sure your customers have the best experience of your brand.
Involve your employees throughout, share ideas early, validate and prioritise solutions and quantify those that will make the biggest impact on your EX to avoid expensive mistakes.
Get in touch if you’d like to know more about the tools and digital solutions that can help you to create the best human experiences to drive business growth.
Contact Us
To learn more about how we can help bring meaning and value to your customer data to drive rapid results, speak to us today.
Call us on: +44 20 3828 6440
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Email: paul.vallois@nimbletank.com